Ethics of Dark Tourism: Towards a model of morality in secular society

Abstract

Ethical quandaries of tourism at sites of death or disaster are a defining feature of what has become commonly known as ‘dark tourism’. Indeed, the moral implications of touristic visits to sites of death or sites associated with death have received a considerable amount of commentary over the past twenty years or so. Yet the moral panic that often surrounds the ‘dark leisure’ experience and the apparent deviance that it may create is not straightforward. In this essay, therefore, I critically examine the construction of morality against a socio-cultural backdrop of secularization and individualization. In so doing, I argue that dark tourism and deviant leisure is neither dark nor deviant. Instead, I contend dark tourism places can embody and even strengthen notions of human connectivity, translate ethics and reconfigure boundaries of morality and, ultimately, create ontological meanings for the secular Self.