Chapter 7 Dignity as the Missing Principle
Tourism ethics has lacked a foundation. Various principles have been proposed: sustainability, responsibility, equity, community benefit. Each captures something important, but none provides a comprehensive ground on which to build. This chapter argues that dignity is the missing principle, the foundation that can organize and evaluate other ethical claims in tourism.
Dignity is the inherent worth of persons that exists prior to and independent of social recognition. It is not earned but possessed. It cannot be lost through failure or withdrawn as punishment. In the Kantian formulation, dignity requires treating persons as ends in themselves, never merely as means. In the human rights tradition, dignity is the foundation from which all rights derive.
What does dignity demand in tourism contexts? It demands that the worth of host lives, cultures, and ecosystems not be subordinate to visitor satisfaction. This is a stronger claim than it might appear. Contemporary tourism systematically subordinates host dignity to visitor experience. Understanding how this happens, and what dignity would require instead, is the task of this chapter.
Consider how hosts appear in tourism discourse. They are service providers, cultural resources, authentic inhabitants, friendly locals. Each of these framings treats hosts as means to tourist ends. Service providers exist to serve. Cultural resources exist to be consumed. Authentic inhabitants exist to be observed. Friendly locals exist to welcome. The host's own purposes, desires, and flourishing rarely enter the analysis.
This instrumentalization is not always malicious. Tourism professionals may genuinely believe they are helping communities by providing economic opportunities. But the framing determines what counts as help. If hosts are service providers, then successful tourism provides service employment. Whether that employment treats workers with dignity, whether it contributes to their flourishing as human beings, falls outside the frame.
Dignity requires a different starting point. Instead of asking what hosts can provide to tourists, dignity asks what tourism can provide to hosts. Instead of measuring success by visitor satisfaction, dignity measures success by host wellbeing. Instead of treating communities as inputs to tourism production, dignity treats tourism as a tool that communities may choose to use (or not) for their own purposes.
This inversion sounds simple but its implications are radical. Most tourism development begins with demand analysis: what do tourists want, and how can destinations provide it? Dignity-based tourism would begin with community analysis: what do residents want for their community, and can tourism help achieve it? If the answer is no, then tourism should not be pursued, regardless of demand.
The dignity of hosts includes multiple dimensions. Economic dignity requires compensation adequate for a decent life, work that does not degrade, and opportunities for advancement. Cultural dignity requires respect for traditions, representation that does not stereotype, and control over cultural display. Political dignity requires voice in decisions that affect communities, power to refuse unwanted development, and recognition as agents rather than objects.
Each dimension is routinely violated in contemporary tourism. Economic dignity is violated by poverty wages, precarious employment, and extraction of value to distant shareholders. Cultural dignity is violated by commodification that empties traditions of meaning, stereotyping that reduces complex cultures to marketable images, and performance requirements that alienate people from their own practices. Political dignity is violated by development imposed without consent, consultation processes that lack binding power, and structural dependence that forecloses genuine choice.
The dignity of places also demands attention. Tourism discourse treats destinations as products, branding them and marketing them like commodities. But places are not products. They are living systems inhabited by communities, ecosystems, histories, and futures. Treating places as products violates a dignity that belongs not just to the humans who live there but to the places themselves.
This may seem like category confusion. How can a place have dignity? The answer lies in recognizing that places are more than locations. They are accumulations of meaning, relationship, and life. When tourism degrades a place (through overcrowding, pollution, commercialization, displacement), it does not just harm individual persons. It harms the place itself, the web of relationships and meanings that constitutes it. Places can be violated, and the language of dignity captures this possibility.
Environmental dignity extends the argument further. Tourism impacts ecosystems in ways that standard ethics struggles to capture. Species loss, habitat fragmentation, resource depletion: these harms fall on beings that cannot claim rights in human terms. Dignity discourse, by grounding worth in being rather than claiming, can recognize these harms without requiring that ecosystems speak for themselves.
What would dignity-based tourism look like in practice? It would begin with assessment: does proposed tourism development respect or violate the dignity of affected hosts, places, and ecosystems? This assessment would be binding, not advisory. Development that fails the dignity test would not proceed, regardless of economic potential.
Existing tourism would be evaluated by the same standard. Operations that violate dignity would be required to change or close. This might include resorts that pay poverty wages, attractions that stereotype cultures, developments that displace residents, and activities that degrade ecosystems. The transition would be disruptive, but dignity cannot be contingent on convenience.
Dignity-based tourism would also redistribute power. Communities would control tourism decisions affecting them. Workers would have meaningful voice in employment conditions. Indigenous peoples would determine whether and how their cultures are displayed. These redistributions are not gifts bestowed by the currently powerful. They are requirements of dignity that the currently powerful must accept.
The tourist's role in dignity-based tourism would also change. Tourists would be expected to recognize the dignity of those they encounter, to behave in ways that honor rather than violate that dignity, and to accept that their desires do not override host rights. This might mean accepting limitations: places that are closed, experiences that are not available, encounters that cannot be purchased.
Some will object that dignity is too abstract a principle for practical application. How do we operationalize dignity? How do we resolve conflicts between different dignity claims? These are fair questions, but they are not unique to dignity. Any ethical principle requires interpretation and application. The advantage of dignity is that it provides a foundation comprehensive enough to integrate other concerns while grounding them in something more fundamental than utility or preference.
Others will object that dignity-based tourism is unrealistic, that the industry will not accept such constraints, that tourists will not pay for such experiences, that communities need tourism revenue regardless of dignity costs. These objections mistake power for necessity. The current system persists not because alternatives are impossible but because powerful interests benefit from it. Dignity-based tourism is possible. It is not yet actual because the political will to demand it has not been mobilized.
This book aims to contribute to that mobilization by providing the intellectual tools it requires. Dignity as the missing principle is one such tool. It provides a standard against which current practice can be judged and found wanting. It provides a goal toward which transformed practice can aim. And it provides a language in which claims can be made and obligations can be specified.
The chapters that follow will continue developing these claims. They will examine the political economy that produces dignity violations. They will explore what post-growth tourism might look like. They will propose mechanisms for institutionalizing dignity in tourism governance. But throughout, dignity remains the foundation: the worth of persons, places, and living systems that tourism must respect if it is to have any moral legitimacy.