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.