Proximity ethics,climate change and the flyer’s dilemma: Ethical negotiations of the hypermobile traveller

Abstract

This article offers a reading of proximity ethics as a novel way of understanding the moral dilemmas that underpin decisions of whether or not to fly. The question of why people fly, despite holding pro-environmental attitudes and knowing that their behaviour, in contradiction, is harming the earth they value, is not an easy one to answer. Through a co-constructed narrative method, we examine our own flying activity in relation to the proximal ethical decisions in the intersection of family, social and work domains. Our stories highlight that the tensions between normative positions on climate change and travel activities are bound up in the ethical proximal relations that compel intimate contact with others, create the need for face-to-face contact and impel obligation in family/work/social domains in a globalised world. Proximity ethics illuminates the flyer’s dilemma as a complex and tenuous web of moral decisions, in which care and proximity play key roles in guiding actions. The contribution of this article lies in its exploration of the quandaries of human behaviour associated with climate change mitigation, using moral philosophy as a window of understanding onto our increasingly technological and hypermobile world.

Keywords

climate change digital worlds ethics flyer’s dilemma hypermobility morality narrative analysis proximity

Introduction

The contemporary hypermobile world in which we live gives rise to new challenges for human beings in forging and maintaining relationships and projects that produce a sense of belonging and life purpose. Many of us are increasingly on the move, often through air travel, even though we are aware that flying results in carbon pollution and that such pollution threatens human life and the ecosystem that sustains it over the long term (Gössling et al., 2013). Tourism presently contributes 5 percent of global CO₂ emissions, and under a business-as-usual scenario, it is set to more than double by 2035, with air travel accounting for most of this growth (Gössling et al., 2013). The lack of fuel alternatives that could lower emissions in aviation and the exhaustion of gains in aircraft efficiencies mean that increased flying will lead to increased carbon pollution. Thus, a person’s decision to take a flight necessarily equals a decision to contribute to this collective problem, imbuing that individual choice with moral weight (Cohen et al., 2014). If we are educated about the dangerous impacts of carbon pollution, and if we hold a moral position of pro-environmentalism and stewardship, then why do we continue to fly? In this article, we draw on the branch of moral philosophy known as ‘proximity ethics’ to shed light on the process of how travellers may negotiate the dilemma of mobility, particularly air travel, in a carbon-constrained world.

Previous research into the disjuncture between knowledge, attitudes, values and behaviour of people who fly has been examined under the topics of general tourist perceptions about flying (Becken, 2007; Cohen and Higham, 2011; Gössling et al., 2012), attitude–behaviour gaps of the environmentally aware tourist (Higham et al., 2013, 2016), tourist offsetting in the aviation sector (Choi and Ritchie, 2014) and flying as addictive behaviour (Cohen et al., 2011). These studies tend to use behavioural and/or psychological frameworks to understand people who fly for tourist purposes. Alternative research on the dilemma includes a focus on mobilities (Higham et al., 2013) and sociological perspectives on the contradictions of environmentally aware tourists who fly (Cohen et al., 2013), as well as a critique of the commonly adopted theoretical approach, which treats flying behaviour as a pathology while ignoring structural determinants of behaviour (Young et al., 2014). Among perspectives on this problem, ethical and moral philosophy has been under-considered.

While existing research addresses a range of travel practices and behaviours and the relationships between these and climate change, scope also exists to further reflect upon the importance of personal connection and interaction and the ways in which face-to-face contact time continues to directly influence our tourism decision-making and subsequent travel behaviours. This article does not intend to revisit well-rehearsed conceptualisations of mobility and migration within the context of visiting friends and family (Cresswell, 2006; Janta et al., 2015), nor does it intend to engage in an in-depth critique of the renegotiation of tourism-related relationships through virtual platforms and social media that has emerged within the literature over recent years (Larsen et al., 2007; Madianou and Miller, 2013; Urry, 2002; Zeng and Gerritsen, 2014). Rather, this article proposes that an ethic of proximity can provide a useful framework to examine the morality of the self and how the other, as manifested through work commitments, family and friends, is implicated in personal ethical action through proximal experiences. This article used a co-constructed narrative methodology between the authors to explore relational experiences of flying for work, visiting friends and family and leisure.

Proximity ethics

Following Nortvedt and Nordhaug (2008), the notion of proximity ethics in philosophy can be understood by attending to three categories of theoretical perspectives: meta-ethics, psychology-influenced philosophy and anthropology-influenced philosophy. Within meta-ethics (or philosophical phenomenology), which focuses on identifying the roots of ethics as a human phenomenon, some have characterised the I–thou relationship as being at the heart of the matter. In this regard, Levinas (1996), on one hand, contends that an ethic based on proximity is only possible through the irreducible otherness of the presence of a face. Husserl, on the other hand, contends that it is the vulnerability of being born into the world that creates a moral dependency, as experienced by the newborn baby which continues through to adult life. This vulnerability demands action from a carer. In both perspectives, there is a dyadic relationship in which the experience of being human emotionally and cognitively calls upon us to consider the other. Seating the basis of the ethical impulse in the I–thou dyad renders ethics as localised at least to some degree because the I–thou encounter in its fullest sense features embodied, sensory, emotional and cognitive dimensions (Thompson, 2001). With the recognition of the face come normative implications for embodied personal action driven by consideration of and for the other and by the significance of physical co-presence in retaining closeness and participation in relationships (Urry, 2002).

In tourism studies, the face has largely been overlooked. While the topics of the gaze of the tourist out to a globalised world (Urry, 2001) and the mutual gaze between the tourist and the host (Maoz, 2006) have received considerable scholarly attention, the ethical dimensions of ‘face-to-face’ relations in the obligations of tourists remain largely unexplored. The first element of a proximity ethics framework offers a way to understand embodied personal action through highlighting the significance of the face and its role in mutual recognition of vulnerability.

Second, proximity ethics draws on work in moral psychology that grounds moral sensitivity in emotion and human empathy (Nortvedt and Nordhaug, 2008). At the heart of this perspective is the capacity for humans to feel, which is what provides access to (other) human experience. Without such a moral structuring process, people would remain blind to the moral domains of others and fail to comprehend the personal significance of events involving others (Vetlesen, 1995). Face-to-face contact from early childhood onwards is important in configuring affective empathy. As Nussbaum (2003) argues, it is nonsensical to try to dissociate the cognitive from the affective component of emotional sensitivity because feeling and interpretation are mutually interdependent in allowing a person, for example, to experience compassion for another’s suffering. Thus, moral responsiveness is an important involuntary dimension of empathy throughout a person’s life and is exhibited through moral responsibility and care (Hoffman, 2001).

The role of empathy has only recently been explored as a specific dimension in tourist studies in its own right (Font et al., 2016; Tucker, 2016). Tucker (2016) emphasises an important point relevant to proximity ethics in that there is an important distinction between unreflective empathy and an unsettled empathy. In the latter, a person, through the attempt to recognise and take the perspective of the other, becomes more at one with the other through empathy. However, a feature of deep empathetic understanding is the apparent failure of the empathetic person to be completely at one with the other. This creates a sense of uneasiness. Thus, empathy is confrontational, not only because of the concern for the other but also because of the unsettling nature of the empathetic process, which involves the self in a never-complete understanding of his or her proximal moral relation to that of other.

Third, proximity ethics draws on anthropological perspectives, which highlight the importance of personal relational attachment for human life (Nortvedt and Nordhaug, 2008). Relational attachment quite often dictates the moral actions of individuals, driving their sense of responsibility towards others. As Scheffler (2001) argues, this is essential in order for relationships to maintain their intrinsic, non-instrumentalist quality, and hence, there is an ethical basis for action based on relational attachment. The proximity of personal relations is important to the affective triggering of moral responsiveness. For example, human suffering, such as that caused by disasters, is felt more acutely by people of the same race or nationality. Airline crashes more deeply affect people when citizens of their own country are on board than when only passengers from distant countries are involved (Boltanski, 1999). Thus, psychology layers with anthropology to render proximity important in producing relational attachments that generate moral responsiveness.

Relational attachments are also central in another important moral philosophy perspective that is a close cousin to proximity ethics – care ethics. Care ethics derives from feminist philosophy and, rather than departing from abstract principles as many other positions in moral philosophy do, is instead rooted in understanding actual people’s lived moral experiences, particularly those of women. Care theorists have observed that the historical experiences of women, despite being as ‘important, relevant, and philosophically interesting’ as those of men, have previously been intellectually ignored, with women’s interactions in the private sphere being imagined as somehow simply natural and instinctive, rooted in the biological realm of reproduction (Held, 2006: 23). This is opposed to the experiences of men in the public sphere, which have been imagined as cultural, creative and complex and, therefore, worthy of philosophical exploration (Held, 2006). Central to those supposedly complexity- and creativity-bereft experiences in the private sphere, however, has been the quite intense and thorny work of care-giving and relationship cultivation, for which women have traditionally taken primary responsibility. The wisdom gained from navigating that domain of work offers a window of critique onto moral philosophies that consider only the complexities of negotiating rights and responsibilities between strangers in the public sphere.

Like Levinas, care theorists emphasise the moral obligations of responsiveness to need that inhere in concrete relationships with proximal others (Held, 2006). Philosophically, this critique is developed as the problematisation of liberal individualism, so central to many dominant moral theories (e.g. Kantianism and utilitarianism). Counter to this position, care ethics argues that we are born into a web of relations that precedes any ontological notion of our existence as individuals. As a feminist philosophy, however, care ethics also takes up the additional political cause of recognising that care is a form of labour and of critiquing the way care work has been and continues to be undervalued (Taylor, 2005).

Practices of care for others in proximal relationships manifest largely as private actions and moral experiences, but they have public consequences (Held, 2006). The potential of care ethics to guide moral positioning and behavioural action of tourists in relation to sustainability has been increasingly recognised (Butcher, 2014; Font et al., 2016). The joining of an ethic of justice and an ethic of care has also been identified as valuable in the pursuit of social sustainability in tourism (Jamal and Camargo, 2014).

A key debate in both proximity and care ethics relevant to our discussion centres on the question of to what extent proximity and distance have any normative claim when it comes to considerations of distributive justice. For example, if the ethical action of an individual is justified based on relational attachment, then to what degree should that action be reduced or extinguished if universal ethics run counter to the initial proximal ethical action. Within tourism studies, the flying dilemma is identified as the disjuncture between the knowledge and behaviour of travellers who know the negative impacts of flying but continue to fly (Higham et al., 2016). This dilemma is not trivial, as climate change has been claimed to be ‘the world’s largest and most complex collective action problem’ (Gardiner, 2011: 61). We argue here that employing the lens of proximity theory can lead to a greater understanding of how such dilemmas are reconciled (or not) in individual human lives in more nuanced ways than simply a justification or denial of apparent moral failure on climate change. Before we examine our personal narratives of flying behaviour to undertake this exploration, however, we first turn to a discussion of the notion of hypermobility and digital worlds in relation to obligation and proximity, to offer a stronger cultural context for our examination.

Proximity, obligation and hypermobility

The rise of hyper tourism-related mobility can be explained in a number of ways. These include an overall increase in population which leads to increases in travel, a diffusion of consumer culture that values travel consumption and the integration of economic capital with social/mobility capital as part of the expanding neoliberal globalised economic system (Hall, 2015). Digital communication technology has also been a key factor in creating demand for tourism activity (Buhalis and O’Connor, 2005), as well as being important in the process of the co-creation of experience (Neuhofer et al., 2013). Examination of the links between technology and tourism highlights the importance of digital technology and travel consumption in changing conceptions of the self. Increasingly, through the use of digital technologies, there is a blurring of the notion of the tourist self and the everyday self (Gretzel and Jamal, 2009). Here, we focus on considering how digital technology is intertwined in the maintenance of (real and virtual) face-to-face proximal relations, thus adding nuance to our exploration of how people negotiate the flyer’s dilemma.

The need for face-to-face contact, both as an intrinsic part of the human experience and for the development of social capital, is profound, and obligation is integral in this process (Urry, 2002). Obligations to maintain social relations occur through legal codes (e.g. laws regarding property), economic interactions (e.g. work duties), familial responsibilities, friendships and intimate relationships. In an increasingly globalised and mobile world, these obligations span greater distances. Increasing mobility through air travel has afforded an increase in proximal relations.

While it seems obvious to conclude that travel affects proximal relations, what is not so clear is the extent to which interpersonal communication technologies (ICTs) and social networking sites (SNS) have affected human communication patterns and shaped our sense of obligations. There are a number of studies which reveal the negative effects of ICTs on various communication contexts, including the overuse of Internet communication as opposed to face-to-face communication (Kraut et al., 1998) and, more recently, the relationship between psychological disorders and Internet addiction (Ko et al., 2012). It is important to recognise the arguable intensification of the erosion of social capital and relative weakening of community in western countries initially through the Internet (Putnam, 1995). More recently, erosion has occurred through the use of hypermobile social media such as Instagram, generating physiological, psychological and social issues through risk of illness (e.g. deep vein thrombosis), stress, anxiety, travel disorientation, feelings of loneliness and isolation (for the traveller and the partner left at home), identity confusion and weakened relationships (Cohen and Gössling, 2015).

However, SNS interactions also play a positive role in the preservation and development of social ties (Sabatini and Sarracino, 2014). As such, families, friends and communities continually negotiate their lives and relationships as they emerge through a continuum of ever-fluid, dynamic fusion of physical and virtual encounters, behaviours and practices. Face-to-face contact through ICTs has been shown to maintain emotional bonds, despite the limitations of time, cost and technological constraints that inherently impact the effectiveness of this form of communication (King-O’Riain, 2015). Larsen (2014) shows, in the case of Filipino families separated through work commitments, that email, social media and phone calls have been used to maintain close social family relationships despite physical distance. Strong ‘social proximal’ relations appear to be maintained contrary to assumptions that technological affordances would not be sufficient to maintain the depth of communication needed for such relations. Furthermore, migration studies have revealed that ICTs can radically alter transnational family experiences, to the extent that migration has been induced as a result of the face-to-face contact through ICTs (Bacigalupe and Cámara, 2012; Dekker and Engbersen, 2014). This indicates that physical proximity is not the only driver in developing and maintaining social relationships.

Although online communication has an important and increasing role in maintaining social ties and emotional connections, people continue to seek out and enjoy embodied encounters with others. Lack of trust in an online context may impel people to seek real face-to-face communication as a path to intimacy (Larsen et al., 2012). As Urry (2002) notes, physical co-presence ‘affords access to the eyes’, which are pivotal in the establishment of trust, as well as in negotiating power and control (p. 259). Our evolutionary context may also have a role to play. As Boyd (2009) explains, humans gain our evolutionary advantage from occupying the cognitive niche, through superior information-processing capabilities. People also rely heavily on cooperation, so being able to process information collaboratively is essential, and for this, people need to be highly skilled at both attention sharing and empathy. It appears that humans are actually cognitively wired for this, as neuroscientists have identified ‘mirror neurons’ or neurons that fire in an observer or listener’s mind and match those firing in the mind of the actor or speaker being observed or heard. (For instance, if person A picks up a hammer or says the word ‘hammer’, particular neurons in her brain will fire related to the motion of grasping the tool, and if person B is watching or hearing her, then the same neurons will fire in his mind.) Although there does not yet appear to be reported experimental work on mirror neuron patterns with the use of ICTs, it is reasonable to hypothesise that transmission time lag, two-dimensional visual appearance, lack of sensory inputs beyond the visual and aural or any other number of factors might compromise our neuro-circuitry’s performance of mirroring, which could partially explain why ICTs, though certainly valuable, never quite seem an adequate substitute for the richness of direct human encounter, at least for some. Overall, this line of research is important in the exploration of proximity and travel, as it offers a potential biological explanation for why physical co-presence is unlikely to ever be fully eclipsed by virtual interactions in a variety of social contexts.

Scholars such as Cheong (1995), Guttentag (2010), Ohrstedt (2015) and Williams and Hobson (1995), among others, have begun to explore the role of augmented reality and virtual reality within tourism. Some argue that new technology such as the four-dimensional (4D) oculus rift adopted by Marriott (2016), which provides virtual encounters for tourists, may remove the need for travel. However, a proximity ethics–oriented view would contend that physical proximity, through touch and other forms of physical connectedness, will continue to be fundamental to human experience, including through tourism (Urry, 2002). We engage in our multiple identities as tourists using a range of platforms, both physical and virtual, and indeed, we live in a highly mobile world where the interplay between the physical and virtual worlds is so profound that it is difficult to imagine everyday life outside of this fusion (Munar, 2010; Munar and Jacobsen, 2013). However, it is the continued undertow of the physical, tangible and material co-presences and interplays of self and other that is emphasised by proximity ethics. The normative implications of proximity in the experience of affective empathy point towards face-to-face embodied experiences as what guides human action and indeed renders personal action possible. By working at the level of personal narrative, we hope to move the discussion beyond general moral theorising of the type contributed by Lovelock (2014), in order to explore how ethical reasoning about the flyer’s dilemma unfolds in actual lives.

Co-constructed personal narrative method

The methodological framework of this article is a combination of the co-constructed narrative method (Polkinghorne, 1995, 2007) and multi-case narrative method (Shkedi, 2005). The purpose of drawing upon these approaches is to use narratives to understand the complex lived experiences and stories of individuals (and their communities).

Two major types of co-constructed narrative analyses are identified in qualitative research methodology: story-based narrative analysis and paradigmatic narrative method (Polkinghorne, 1995, 2007). The former derives stories from phenomena (events, happenings, actions, interactions and textual material) in order to answer a research question. The latter – the method used in this study – is characterised by gathering narratives (stories of events, thoughts and actions) for analysis to determine relevant paradigmatic concepts that are common to the research participants and the researcher. A paradigmatic concept is defined in this method as the shared understanding of the common attributes of a ‘thing’ by groups of people who are associated with that thing (Polkinghorne, 1995). Building networks of paradigmatic concepts helps us make sense of complex phenomena.

The version of paradigmatic narrative analysis used in this study differs from the usual approach. In the typical co-constructed narrative analysis, the shared understanding of a concept would occur between the researcher and the research subject (e.g. an interviewee). In our study, we turned the gaze inwards to create personal narratives and then co-construct paradigmatic concepts through a process of reflecting on each other’s narratives and sharing our thoughts to collectively to derive concepts. This technique has previously been used successfully to examine personal accounts of academics and how they bridge the divide between academic and activist work (Cann and DeMeulenaere, 2012; Hales et al., 2013). It is broadly similar to the standard practice in qualitative research of thematic analysis but has the important distinction that paradigmatic concepts are co-constructed through the researchers’ collective analysis of their own shared narratives.

Importantly, we both had at one time or another contemplated the issues and dilemmas foregrounded in this article, but it was through the process of sharing that those reflections took shape and meaning crystallised. This is important, as narrative analysis is not an account of a pre-existing reality but a meaning-making exercise that unfolds through conducting the research (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000). As such, this method is particularly valuable for philosophical explorations like the present one, where the goal is not to answer a predefined research question by looking for patterns in data but rather to illuminate dynamic thought processes as they are unfolding.

As for our research design, we first determined the central questions which were to be used for reflection. Upon agreeing, an email discussion ensued, in which we refined and selected the questions that would generate the narratives for the research. Both authors wrote their narrative responses and then shared these. Each narrative was then analysed to determine the concepts related to the proximal ethical decisions surrounding air travel. Each of us shared our analysis to derive the most important and common concepts within the narratives. More email correspondence, face-to-face discussion at a conference and then yet more email correspondence ensued in order to build consensus around shared concepts.

Our narratives tell a story of personal activities; meaning-making reflection; explication of personal beliefs, values and attitudes, and the social context surrounding decisions to fly. As two mid-career academics working in tourism programmes at universities in Commonwealth countries, with much in common in terms of our research interests – and also with similarities in our personal lives, as we are both parents and both spouses of partners with transnational families – we share similar subject positions in many regards. Also shared is our characterisation of ourselves as environmentalists, who hold respect for the ecosystem beyond the human species and perceive a moral duty for humans to manage our use of the earth’s resources in such a way as to avoid depleting them, instead seeking to steward them in a way that will sustain future human generations and protect the planet’s biodiversity. In other ways, we differ – for example, by gender, institutional context (Australia vs Canada) and university type (more vs less research focused). Our narratives are grounded in the realities of our subject positions, and we do not assume that our negotiations of the issues explored here will be identical to those of others in hypermobile professions but merely hope they are generative in exploring the potential for proximity ethics (and moral philosophy more generally) to expand our understanding of the flyer’s dilemma beyond what has thus far been contributed by other theories and disciplinary approaches. Our full narratives are not displayed here, due to space limitations; rather, exemplar statements are used for illustration in the collective analysis of concepts below.

Narratives of the ethics of proximity and flying

Our combined inductive and reflective analysis process led us to arrive at four branches of thought in our narratives, relevant to exploring the seemingly contradictory activity of flying while holding a moral position of environmentalism and stewardship:

Moral legitimacy of flying for family reasons;

Unsettling obligations towards flying for work-related reasons;

The moral force of a fast-paced, hypermobile life;

Proximal relations as drivers of climate change care and responsibility.

Here, we discuss each of these; together, they illustrate the value of proximity ethics for illuminating how the flyer’s dilemma is negotiated in actual lives.

Moral legitimacy of flying for family reasons

The first concept identified was the moral legitimacy of flying for family reasons. Both of us were resigned to the fact that we live in a complex, globalised world, where it is now normal to have close friends and family members living across the globe. Both of us felt that face-to-face engagement was important (and also obligatory) for supporting these relationships and that supporting these relationships was, in turn, sufficiently morally compelling to cause us to continue to make the choice to fly. As Kellee noted,

… I fly a lot living in Canada, with family in the US and Spain, and friends all over the world. Not spending time with my loved ones far away – including my [close academic] colleagues – is not an option for me.

There also was a sense that ‘obligation’ was not always a negative feeling but rather meant the positive desire to provide care. Rob also expressed this idea.

There was, however, also a recognition that family obligations are not only shaped by care ethics but also by social constructions of ‘good parenthood’ in a consumer society. In this regard, Rob wrote of feeling compelled to meet the ‘benchmark’ of providing holidays abroad for his son in the context of the hobbies that support his son’s identity:

I feel the pressure to have ‘good’ holidays with him, and the travel habits of his friends dictate that holidays abroad are a benchmark of what is a good holiday. I live near the beach in Australia and his friends are travelling with their families to distant lands for surfing holidays. I feel the obligation to be a good father and provide holidays that satisfy his social and personal desires.

This driver of flying behaviour was morally complex, in the sense that Rob was providing care for his son and support for their relationship, but flying only became a ‘necessary’ part of this process due to the pressure of social norms derived from dubious cultural reasoning about children’s entitlements in wealthy countries in the contemporary era. Subsequent conversations about the narratives led Rob to further confess that personal desires surely play a role in his vacation decisions as well – what surf-lover would not enjoy checking out the waves in far-flung places? Thus, motivations for taking a family holiday are complex, but it was ultimately Rob’s care-taking impulse for his son that rose up as the legitimating factor behind his decision to fly, despite his critical stance towards the social conditions that construct ‘good’ family holidays as ones taken abroad.

Present throughout both narratives was also the idea of ICTs and the connections they facilitate with family (and with work colleagues). As Rob noted,

I have noticed that the more contact my partner and I have with her family and friends through Facebook and Skype, the greater the sense of importance in connecting with these people face to face.

ICTs arguably have a proximal relational effect that facilitates a need for more actual face-to-face contact. As mentioned previously in the discussion on digital worlds, the rise of face-to-face communication technology seems to allow for a greater sense of connection, thus nurturing moral legitimacy for travel undertaken in order to achieve real face-to-face contact.

Both authors’ relative comfort with flying (as seemingly unquestioned behaviour) and assessment of its moral legitimacy predominated in our ethical decision-making when flying represented the only possibility for face-to-face interactions with loved ones living far away. The moral dissonance, or awareness–action gap, for individuals has been an increasing phenomenon with growing awareness of the climate change impacts of flying (Lovelock, 2014), but the moral intersection of family relationship maintenance and carbon-based mobility has received only limited discussion (Tiller and Schott, 2013). Our narrative analysis indicates that proximity ethics is very much worth exploring as a framework through which people legitimise flying behaviour, as seen in the absence of any perception of real moral dilemma among either author in the context of flying for family connections, despite regretting the carbon impact.

Unsettling obligations towards flying for work-related reasons

A key concept in our narratives was the justification of work-related flying. Justifying flying for work-related travel was based on the importance of proximal social relations that necessitated face-to-face contact. This stemmed from the importance of building and nurturing international collaborations regarding academic research and the need to have face-to-face contact to develop trust in the working relationship, spending time together to gain a deeper understanding of the lives and working cultures of others and the opportunities and challenges that determine each situation and sharing ideas in a spontaneous way.

Key drivers of work-related travel were care for others and care of the self, for sustenance in order to continue to serve a larger cause of worth. Both of us spoke of the importance of face-to-face interactions with colleagues from other parts of the globe. Conferences, in particular, were perceived as providing the equivalent of ‘intellectual soul food’, stimulating creativity (essential for knowledge production) and providing the opportunity to forge and maintain relationships (the building blocks for collaborative capacity), which is central for advancing knowledge in the field. In this sense, care-based obligations in the work context were similar to those in the home context, but with an added abstract dimension. If the motive was to support the maintenance of relationships, then flying was seen as making moral sense, but these relationships were more complex than those discussed in the context of family and friends because they had both intrinsic value and also catalytic value in creating knowledge for the greater good. Thus, both proximity ethics and a broader, more abstract form of care for those not proximal featured in our moral reasoning patterns.

However, when work-related travel was conceived as being driven by other motivations besides care, flying for work was viewed as more troubling. Rob, for instance, spoke of the negative feeling of being driven to fly by performance pressures wrought from a neoliberal university environment:

Travelling from Australia to Europe (for a conference) creates guilt but neoliberal pressures of performance in higher education in Australia means I need to extend to the international sphere of academia.

Kellee’s narrative featured a scathing critique of managerialism in academia, attributing much of what she saw as the unnecessary and harmful busyness of today’s university environment to what Munar (2016), drawing on Habermas, calls the ‘steering’ of contemporary social institutions like higher education by market forces (rather than through political negotiation processes among stakeholders). There was a strong sense, in the conversations that unfolded following the authoring of the narratives, that flying for work purposes was troublesome if the ultimate drivers behind the flying behaviour were rooted in managerialism and performativity (Tribe, 2003), rather than in care for colleagues or students or in efforts of knowledge production for the greater good.

Our personal negotiation of work travel echoes broader discussions within the academy about the value of travel for scholarly purposes, particularly conference travel. Certainly, conferences do not always live up to their noble image, as spaces for open knowledge sharing and community building. Such critiques, combined with concerns about both the environment and the wise use of public resources, and also with optimism about digital innovation, have led some to question whether knowledge could progress just as well without face-to-face conferences, simply by the academy taking better advantage of digital alternatives. Recognition that conference participation is in some ways a technology of academia’s growing performativity ideology helps substantiate the claim that conferences primarily benefit the curriculum vitae (CV) of individual academics who travel (Hopkins et al., 2016).

At the same time, however, even those who advocate for replacing traditional conferences with digital alternatives (e.g. Le Quéré et al., 2015) recognise that the former have unique benefits – most especially that they can serve as important forums for trust building (to which we would also add relationship building, of which trust is but one central element in the process (Held, 2006)). All of this, of course, begs a more fundamental question: How important are relationships, and the trust and other features they are built upon, for knowledge production? Does their importance vary based on what sort of phenomena one is seeking to produce knowledge about, and what one seeks to know about said phenomena? It is noteworthy that most claims that conferences are less important for knowledge production than traditionally assumed come either out of the natural sciences or from social researchers who appear to embrace science-derived epistemologies. It is harder to imagine scholars who view knowledge as created rather than discovered so readily logging trust building as one more enumeration on a list of pros and cons about the value of conferences (Le Quéré, 2015), as opposed to seeing it as fundamental to the whole enterprise (see Berg and Seeber, 2016, for an excellent argument in this regard). It would be hard to imagine, for example, the current state of the philosophy of science, absent the deep friendship that unfolded during the last century between Lakatos and Feyerabend, and one need not look hard to find the same sorts of occurrences in tourism studies.

Although there is much enthusiasm for technological substitution among those who advocate curtailing face-to-face conferencing, we are sceptical. While one could imagine ways that social media could certainly enhance knowledge sharing and scholarly interaction, descriptions such as Le Quéré et al.’s (2015), of Twitter feeds running alongside virtual conference sessions, are startling: Is nothing lost when traditional academic discourse is transferred into 140-character snippets? Le Quéré et al. (2015) further advocate exploring virtual reality technology for replacing traditional conferencing, suggesting that it would potentially allow ‘the sharing of the experience of attending a conference or meeting as well as the content’ (n.p., their emphasis). This notion of ‘experience’ does not resonate with our own, as not merely cognitive but also embodied and emotional creatures. In the end, proximity ethics helped us to make sense of the felt truth of our individual lived experiences that there was something deep and meaningful happening in our lives through co-presence at particular academic gatherings that could not be duplicated through technology any more than Skype, however much appreciated, could ever become an adequate substitute for sitting down with a loved one across a cup of coffee and feeling the pull of each other’s rhythms while listening and sharing. Berg and Seeber (2016) offer an interesting defence of the value of co-presence in the classroom, grounded in the affective productivity that ensues in face-to-face settings, and their argument can easily be extrapolated to the context of academic conferences and the learning and intellectual development – not to mention relationship building – which (at least in the best cases) goes on there.

Proximity ethics thus proved useful in helping us to understand what sorts of thinking were underpinning our sense of pull to travel in some contexts related to our academic work, while also producing feelings of resistance, with an underlying cognitive dissonance associated with our sense of pro-environmental values. This can be best described as an unsettled obligation through reflexive understanding of our motivations for flying for work.

The moral force of a fast-paced, hypermobile life

We both agreed that the contemporary life conditions of intense pace and hypermobility act in tandem with proximal relations to produce new moral imaginaries. Kellee expressed that even for academics like herself, who are relatively insulated from neoliberal pressures, the pace of contemporary life is itself a problem, presumably because it interferes with some paths of providing care, including caring for others affected by climate change, both presently and in the future, by slowing down to exercise more responsible (but time-consuming) behaviours. As she explained,

The problem is that I’m always doing too much, trying to work on too many different projects at the same time. I take on too much [largely] because I don’t want to say no. [Recently] I took a survey forwarded to my university community by our student environmental action group, and I found myself reporting things like not turning off my computer at the end of the day because I feel like I don’t have time to wait for it to reboot in the morning, or time to create an organizational system where I file my work away at the end of the day instead of leaving open files and websites strewn all over my computer screen so that I can remember what I was doing the day before.

I feel very guilty for not making the time to practice sustainable behaviors … [But at the same time,] I take on too much because my fundamental stance toward life is to be nurturing. My feminist ethic of care drives me to write chapters for friends’ books; to allow my students to revise and resubmit all graded material; to step in as interim chair of committees (or even my whole department) when others go on sabbatical and I know I have the knowledge base to step in more easily than colleagues for whom the learning curve in that area would be higher; to only turn down reviewing papers when I don’t have the expertise and never because I ‘don’t have time’, because I know how hard it is to be in the shoes of the one who has to find reviewers and because I know I will genuinely care about the authors in an academy where there’s so much rudeness and dismissiveness under the cover of anonymity; and to be patient when colleagues or students drop in needing to talk, even though I feel stressed and hassled by the tasks yet unfinished. I need to somehow balance this care-taking urge with building a slower life, where I can take time to turn off the computer and remember to bring my refillable coffee cup to work every day.

Attempting to negotiate the competing demands of modern life has an effect of necessitating a faster pace to ensure all ‘objectives’ in a person’s life are fulfilled. Rob, for example, spoke of piggybacking a conference travel obligation together with a trip taken from the southern to the northern hemisphere for his wedding celebration to a partner from a different country, which helped to justify flying for the former through the moral legitimacy of the latter. Flying is helpful in negotiating competing time pressures, and one can even be seduced into reasoning in the register of capturing efficiencies (although not necessarily a bad move from a carbon standpoint).

In the end, there was a sense in our broader discussion that life pace constitutes a moral problem, by virtue of driving non-optimal moral decision-making but in a way that is complicated by an undercurrent of care ethics. Life moves too fast to be ideally pro-environmental, but one of the reasons for this pace is the need to care for so many proximal others, as communications and mobility technologies expand spheres of intimacy. There is an intensity when such forces load atop lives already saturated with care-deserving proximal others, as is the case (for example) with teachers.

Proximal relations as drivers of climate change care and responsibility

Interestingly, as seen through the authors’ narratives, proximity ethics functioned not only to compel flying behaviour in the interest of care for others but also to trigger guilt/responsibility through proximal relations to suffering others. Rob, for instance, spoke powerfully about the realisation that his neighbours in nearby South Pacific island nations were under duress from rising sea levels and other fallout from climate change. His concern for their plight was further deepened as a result of having friends or family members living on these neighbouring islands:

Recently I saw protesters from south pacific paddle out into a major coal port in Australia and stop coal exports in protest of climate change – I saw it on Facebook. The face of people in the pictures and the vulnerability of these people had an impact on me. These people came from countries in the South Pacific like Kiribati. I have friends who either live in this country or who have family there. Through this connection (face to face with people who are impacted) the news of protesters coming to Australia to protest against coal exports brings on a feeling of obligation – of feeling like I have responsibility to my friends and my friends’ families to act on climate change mitigation.

He also spoke of a face-to-face conference interaction that had a profound impact on his own flying behaviours:

Stefan Gössling gave a talk at the 2014 CAUTHE conference where he stated that the present trip he was undertaking in Australia was his last long-haul trip. Listening to him and chatting to him (face to face) inspired me to act. An example of this is my decision not to cash in frequent flyer points.

Similarly, Kellee conveyed that her guilt over failing to slow down to engage in more environmentally responsible behaviours arose in the context of taking a survey from her campus’ student environmental group (as quoted in the previous subsection). When pressed by students – the group of people arguably most central to a university teacher’s care ethic – it became impossible for Kellee not to confront the fact that one can become so busy in caring for the immediate needs of proximal others that she fails to do her part to provide care in supporting their long-term dreams, which in this case included her students’ vision for a sustainable future.

One way to understand what is happening here is to return to our previous discussion on empathy, wherein we noted Tucker’s (2016) notion of empathy as ‘unsettling’. Obligations towards others tend to be borne out of concern for those others, made possible through our empathic connection with them. These very same people, however, may have concerns about their own impacts on others, and thus empathetic understanding may be doubly unsettling if we are willing to expand our capacity in this regard.

Discussion

The power of proximal care reasoning clearly comes through in the narratives we composed as we began to contemplate this article. We experienced virtually no perception of dilemma when it came to flying for the purpose of spending time with friends and family. Even our understandings of knowledge production in our field, and of the potential of what value can be enacted through academic lives, were rooted to a significant degree in our concrete relationships with proximal ‘epistemic others’.

However, all may not be lost for us, when it comes to making decisions towards behavioural change in our flying-generated carbon output volumes. Proximity ethics may potentially play a positive role in changing flying activity, through cultivating an awareness of the impacts of our carbon consumption on proximal others – our neighbours today, the individuals of future generations and those who will, in turn, follow them (if we can manage to do things right). A key project of care ethics, after all, has been to take proximal relational experiences as a point of departure and ask how they might inform a broader ethics of how people should behave towards others in our world who exist more distantly from ourselves (Boltanski, 1999; Held, 2006; Robinson, 2011). In other words, care ethics has sought not to pit our moral pull towards concrete others in our life-worlds against our obligations to more distant others but rather to explore how reflecting upon and understanding our experiences of the former might illuminate better ways of handling our obligations to the latter.

Levinas, too, recognised this issue, noting that a concern with justice is always present in contexts of care because, beyond I and thou, there is always a ‘third’ – those outside the dyad in question, each of whom is also an other, deserving of care and responsibility in his or her own right (Taylor, 2005). This ‘Levinasian third’ demonstrates that the problem of how one ought to behave towards those outside one’s immediate sphere of relations cannot be completely separated from the kinds of considerations that arise within concrete, immediate relationships.

Boltanski’s (1999) notion of distant suffering may also be useful in considering practical ways in which people might leverage proximity-grounded moral compulsions towards others who will be indirectly impacted as a result of their flying behaviour. He argues that empathy has become central to politics since the 1800s, and this discourse compels people to morally respond to another’s plight even at considerable distance (as can be witnessed through media). The moral sphere of recognising justice has been expanded through media and travel. As Boltanski (1999) highlights, recognition of real and present suffering occurs through our concrete actions in relation to that distant suffering and not through simply passively viewing suffering through mainstream media. So, perhaps a serious dedication towards political action that would place people in relations of interaction, rather than voyeurship, with distant others could be a starting point.

It is worth noting that both our narratives contained extensive discussion about ways we sought to mitigate our flying behaviours, travelling by road or train instead when at all possible, considering fuel efficiency in our car purchasing decisions and striving to undertake other kinds of environmentally responsible behaviours. It seems that it is not the case that people are unwilling to change their behaviours or experience inconvenience towards the goal of planetary health – rather, there are simply other important considerations that go beyond individualised responses to a collective action dilemma. Likely, we ignore these other considerations at our peril. This is the case both because of the ontological credibility they command – rooted as they are in our lived experience as humans (as meta-ethics, psychology-influenced and anthropology-influenced branches of philosophy have all, as previously noted, caught on to) – and also because ignoring them means also ignoring the (less certain but still plausible) potential of today’s direct relational experiences to inform wider spheres of care tomorrow, as scholars such as Boltanski (1999) would suggest.

Ultimately, however, we believe that the outcomes of this article implicitly suggest the limits of technocratic approaches, such as those advocated by Le Quéré et al. (2015), to substantively change flying patterns in people’s personal and professional lives. Based on our analysis of our own narratives, such approaches seem unlikely to fully succeed because they do not take into account the relational and proximity-based drivers behind people’s choices to fly in real-life contexts. Technocratic solutions do not address the underlying relational ontology that structures human experience (indeed, increasingly on ever-greater spatial scales). If we take a more holistic approach that is grounded in human lived experience, then perhaps we will find that there is room for an enlarged care ethics to inform further patterns of environmentally responsible behaviour that can lead to emission reductions, even if a complete cessation of flying is not practical to achieve.

Conclusion

This article investigated the role of proximity ethics in encouraging or discouraging people’s problematic flying practices. What we have hoped to highlight is the value of moral philosophy and of narrative analysis for exploring the quandaries of human behaviour in our complex world. Outlining disjuncture between knowledge, attitudes, values and behaviours, as is typically done in the social science disciplines, can only partially illuminate the complexity of negotiating universal justice issues and personal moral positions. Why do we struggle so much with the practice of flying, despite holding pro-environmental attitudes and knowing that our behaviour is, in contradiction, harming the earth we value? A likely reason is that our proximal relations generate a sense of care which tends to take precedence over more abstract moral principles such as universal justice, which are not rooted in our lived relational exchanges with visceral others. But at the same time, we do live in a world with distant, abstract others, who as the ‘Levinasian third’, lay a valid claim to our care, too. Figuring out how best to exercise that care for both concrete and abstract others, in a fast-paced, hypermobile, globally connected, neoliberal, ecologically suffering world, is no easy moral question.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Rob Hales is a senior lecturer in the Griffith Business School, Griffith University. His research interests include socio-political and ethical dimensions of climate change, sustainable tourism, First Peoples research, environmental education and activism.

Kellee Caton is an associate professor in the Faculty of Adventure, Culinary Arts, and Tourism at Thompson Rivers University. Her research interests include philosophical issues in tourism, epistemology, and tourism’s role in ideological production.

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