Looking with Respect: An Attention Account of Leisure Tourism

Is it disrespectful to tour modern ruins? Elizabeth Scarbrough argues that the organized “urban exploration” tour in Detroit that takes tourists to visit decaying buildings involves disrespect for local people in virtue of the tour’s exploitative nature. In this paper, I argue that Scarbrough’s account does not fully explain what makes it disrespectful for individuals to join organized group tours and, perhaps more critically, to tour the ruins on their own. Some crucial features that explain why it can be disrespectful for individual tourists to tour modern ruins on private, self-conducted trips need to be further developed. In this paper, I apply Iris Murdoch’s concept of attention to tourists’ interactions with ruins and other places, and propose a Murdochian attention account—one that shifts our focus from a negative register where the concern is to avoid disrespect, into a positive one—where we consider what it would take to engage in leisure tourism with respect. I argue that a respectful instance of leisure tourism involves attending to certain aspects of the place and, oftentimes, to its local communities in a just and loving manner.