Paved with Good Intentions: Moral Evaluation of Volunteer Tourism as Social Action

Abstract

Abstract This article explores how social actors account for their participation in a socially contested and criticized activity, while maintaining their moral self-worth. As a case study, the article focuses on volunteer tourism—a practice positioned at the intersection of economic inequality and global historical power relations, in which tourists combine volunteering in the Global South with vacationing. Despite public criticism, the practice is growing in popularity. Analyzing 48 in-depth interviews using theoretical ideas from the new cultural sociology of morality, I identify three predominant justifications invoked by volunteers to explain their actions. With each of these, interviewees assert the righteousness of their intentions, distancing themselves from the potentially negative outcomes of their actions—thus maintaining their moral self-worth, criticism of their actions notwithstanding. In articulating these claims, social actors express a distinct logic through which the moral evaluation of a social action is undertaken, emphasizing fundamental components of the action, referred to here as the intention and outcome propositions. The article highlights the importance of these interrelated propositions in understanding moral evaluations of an action, particularly in cases of possible moral devaluation.