In the latest in his series of articles exploring why we travel, David Jobanputra asks what impact our travelling has on the places we visit, and by extension what factors we should take into account when deciding where to travel. Government advice warns us against going to certain countries on grounds of safety; but should we base our final decisions on considerations framed more around the deeper implications of our visit?

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In the series so far, we have looked at modern-day leisure travel from a range of provocative perspectives: travel as religion, adventure or chronic consumption, as imperialism, idealism or international development. The point of these at times pejorative polemics was to get us thinking about what travel is, which paves the way for more moral musings on the matter of what travel should be. This forms the theme of these final two essays.

Before we kick off, a word about normative ethics. (Don’t worry – it’s not as scary as it sounds.) Normative ethics, quite simply, are concerned with ‘should’ questions. Should we go to war? Should we have the death penalty? Should we legalise bigamy? And so on. ‘Should questions’ are funny things really. They allude to a kind of template for existence (e.g. ‘what you should have done was…’) where none really exists. Nevertheless, we are everywhere confronted with normative claims (e.g. ‘you should recycle’, ‘you shouldn’t pick your nose’, ‘you should get a haircut’) and travel is little exempt; the question ‘where should we travel?’ is of this same type. Bear in mind, though, that what is normative is also subjective; in the end, what you should do is up to you.

So where should we travel? Well, at the time of writing, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advised against all but essential travel to over 50 countries, including Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Zimbabwe and Haiti. Such places, we are told, are unsafe, but is this reason enough not to travel there? Here, as with any normative dilemma, we suppose there are pros and cons. There are x number of reasons why we shouldn’t travel (the risk to our safety, the cost of insurance, the concern of our family and friends, etc.) and y number of reasons why we should (supporting economies, offering aid, spreading democratic ideals, etc.). Ultimately, our decision boils down to a crude cost-benefit analysis; we weigh our gain against others’ using our own subjective scales and then take action accordingly. If the balance tips in our hosts’ favour, we may feel free to proceed. If, however, it is only us guests who stand to gain (as is the case for self-styled ‘disaster tourists’, gawping shutter-bugs with a Robert Capa complex), we might do well to reconsider.

Often, the normative issue isn’t one of danger and disaster; for some countries, the question of whether or not to travel is based on political considerations. Take Burma for example. On the one hand, we are told that tourism provides economic benefits to civilians and ‘raises awareness’ of their situation; on the other, we hear that it sources income to the military junta, thus furthering the cause of oppression. Should we travel to Burma, or Tibet, or the DRC? Again, the normative is subjective.

Whether or not one chooses to visit such places cannot be seen as either a violation of or an assent to some essential moral standard. Rather, the decision is a personal one that is likely informed by a wide range of factors: our thoughts about democracy and freedom, our sense of adventure, our concern for how others may see us and so on. It is not about a right or wrong choice. Nor is it about perfect information (e.g. ‘don’t you know that [Country X] has the one of the world’s worst human rights records’) – the normative makes no appeal to reality. What should we do? Look once again at the scale, and make a personal choice.

There are some tourist destinations that are contentious for reasons other than risk or political instability. In recent years, the dense forests of Western Papua and the upper Amazon Basin have become sites for so-called ‘first contact tourism’, in which wealthy hicks cough up upwards of $5000 to come face-to-face with a previously ‘untouched’ people. Okay, so ‘first contact’ may be a myth – almost all the world’s tribes have had at least some interaction with ‘the outside world’ – but regardless, one is inclined to wonder how anyone’s personal moral scale can tip in favour of such a trip. It would be difficult to argue that the terms of this arrangement are anything other than slack-jawed adventure freak-show for me, bother and bemusement for them. This, then, is as close as we come to a normative consensus, for it is nonsense to allege that anyone other than oneself derives significant benefit. Indeed, only the intruder takes pleasure in intrusion.

So where should we travel? Well, the answer comes not in the shape of a neat list of safe and civil locations, but rather in the form of another question: how should we travel? As the present debates makes clear, it’s often not where you go that matters (even in a subjective sense) but what you do when you get there. (Compare, for example, cholera relief in Haiti with a cross-dressing pub crawl in Crete.) So how should we travel? We’ll return to this question in next week’s piece.