Can one be an unethical ecotourist? A response to R. Buckley's ‘In search of the Narwhal’

Abstract

This paper is a response to an article written by Professor Ralf Buckley in 2005 in which he questions whether one can be an unethical ecotourist. In order to demonstrate that a ‘genuine’ ecotourist is by definition ethical, a brief discussion of Kant's perspective along with Hodgkinson's Value Paradigm is presented. It is argued that in order to understand the behaviours of ecotourists and operators, one must be cognisant of the notion of intention. The article concludes with a statement suggesting that ecotourist must be defined in terms of its ontological ethical nature in opposition to Professor Buckley's perspective.

Keywords:

• values
• intention
• ecotourism
• ethics

Notes

Journal of Ecotourism, 4(2), 129–134.

The criteria of worth for the pragmatists is ‘cash value’ or whether or not it makes a difference to one's behaviour to hold a particular view.