Luxury cruise lines and their passengers are being condemned in some quarters for continuing to dock their ships at Haiti’s private beaches while the rest of Haiti is in the midst of destruction, death and horror. “Royal Caribbean is performing a sickening act to me by taking tourists to Haiti,” one critic wrote one poster on CNN’s “Connect the World” blog. “Having a beach party while people are dead, dying and suffering minutes away hardly makes me want to cruise that particular line,” wrote another.

The cruises were all booked long before the earthquake and aftershocks that  crushed the island nation, but some critics feel that both the cruise line and their patrons had an ethical obligation to cancel the trips, once it was obvious that so much human suffering would be just miles away.
“What sort of message is Royal Caribbean sending to the tourism industry,” one indignant columnist on a travel website wrote, “when it says that docking a ship in Haiti following an unspeakable disaster, allowing passengers to fly down zip lines and soak up the sun on private beaches while thousands of people are dying, is OK?  It’s a message that says, ‘you know what, the ‘locals’ may be suffering – may be dying, may be screaming for their loved ones amidst piles of rubble – but that’s not really of our concern, because as tourists, we’re not a part of it. We drop off some packaged food and move on.’”

I think ethics commentators and other have mostly gotten this issue right, despite the hysterics. “OK” is not a precise term. Does it mean “ethical” in this context, or “seemly,” “appropriate,” “socially acceptable,” “sensitive” or “compassionate”? The question is whether a tourist going through with a planned vacation cruise to a private Haitian beach while Port-au-Prince is in ruins is objectively wrong.

The answer is, “No.”

This is a good issue for the Ethics Alarms favorite question: “What’s going on here?” What’s going on is that the contrast between the misery of the Haitian people and the life-style of the tourists is jarring when they are in such close proximity. Even the always reasonable and astute Chris MacDonald, author of the Business Ethics Blog, is made queasy, by this, writing:

“There’s something a bit ‘off’ about having fun in the sun while others are suffering so near-by. It’s a bit like having a picnic adjacent to a funeral. It seems tacky.”

Well, having a picnic next to a funeral is wrong, because it is disrespectful to the mourners, who can see the picnickers playing Frisbee. But if the picnic is only near the funeral but not visible to it? I don’t think that’s even tacky, and that is essentially what enjoying a holiday on a private Haitian beach is like right now.

The critics are really saying, “How dare you have fun and revel in your material benefits while people are suffering?” This springs from the same bad logic and emotional reasoning that caused many Americans to demand that sporting events and stage performances be cancelled in the weeks following the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. It is, essentially, “We’d feel guilty having a good time, so you have an obligation not to have a good time either.” The ethical values involved are empathy and generosity, and the assertion is that the standards for these should be higher for the cruise passengers than for people enjoying themselves anywhere else in the world.

Why? Will canceling the cruises help the Haitians in need? No. Will tourists going through with the planned trip compound the Haitian people’s misery? No!  Will the fact that there is a cruise ship docked sixty miles away upset the Haitians in Port-au-Prince? I would say that’s the least of their concerns, wouldn’t you? “My family is dead, I have no home and I’m  starving, but what really upsets me is that there are those rich people sunning themselves within a two-hour car ride of here.” An unlikely thought, to say the least.

Is there any substantive difference between a tourist enjoying a stop on a beach near Haiti following the disaster and a tourist visiting the Greek Isles in the same period? Yes! The Haitian vacation puts some money into the ruined Haitian economy, and Dominican Republic cruises (also under attack as unethical) help Haiti’s neighbor at a time when it is sending aid next door: it’s better for Haiti than the Greek trip. There is no reason for the tourists whose advance plans for their vacations unluckily collided with a natural disaster to feel guilty or change their plans. They can do either if they want to, of course, but that would be no more right than going through with their cruises would be wrong. They can also contribute generously to the Haitian relief effort (the cruise lines are doing this, no doubt in part to mollify the critics), but the tourists have no more of an ethical duty to do so that anyone else.

The verdict on the Haitian cruises is clear. Ethical objections to them arise from the “ick factor,” an emotional reaction to a strange or unusual situation that confounds “unpleasant” with “unethical.”  So enjoy your vacation, folks.

If you can.