Travel Nonsense, Moral Licence

                                                                Travel

Farms near Auvers, 

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]

Do
Plan your journey with an emissions calculator, such as ecopassenger.org. These use the haversine formula algorithm to plot air travel and the same data to work out alternative routes to your destination on the European railway network.

You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?

Pick a climate-conscious airline. No such thing as guilt-free air travel, but the Atmosfair Airline Index (atmosfair.de) of 200 major airlines sorts the good from the bad.

I don’t feel guilty when I travel by plane. A climate conscious airline indeed.

Do offset and inset.

No chance. Don’t be silly.

Take an eco-pledge.

What?

Airbnb it. Homes use less energy and water and generate less waste than a resort or hotel.

I do use Airbnb but have read that by doing so I am harming those people who want to rent in the cities I visit because the prices rise.

The cases in the lightweight Samsonite S’Cure Eco luggage range are made from recycled polypropylene and wood fibre (from £195; samsonite.co.uk)

£195 for a suitcase? You are taking the mickey. I shall use my fifteen year old bag. Isn’t that more “eco-friendly”?

Don’t

Do it for the ’gram. Geotagging Instagram hotspots has been shown to cause copycat travel, as social media travellers swarm to vulnerable locations to replicate each other’s experiences and pictures.

Baa Baa.

Plan to leave holiday clothes in your host country.

Why should anyone do that?

(Lucy Siegle, The Times, 2019)

Moral Licence

Do parents have the right to change a stinking nappy at a restaurant table? You might assume, as I did, the correct answer is, hell no. Yet reading a recent online debate I was startled by how many disagreed. That raising children is an arduous, stressful self-sacrifice, they reasoned, entitled parents to commit this disgusting selfish act.

Hercules Crushing Discord, 

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) (and studio)

Photo Credit: The Banqueting House - Whitehall Palace, 
Historic Royal Palaces [CC BY-NC-ND]

Believing that because you are a “good” person you have permission to do a bad thing is what psychologists call moral licence. It is epidemic in modern parenting.

…Moral licence gives cyclists the right to scream in pedestrians’ faces if we complain about them riding on pavements: “Move aside for we eco-gods who risk our lives in combat with cars.”

…I heard the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams on Radio 4 describe the milk-shaking of Nigel Farage as “ludic and playful”. (Williams has justified protestors spitting on journalists and Tory party delegates as a response to social exclusion.) Aditya Chakrabortty, of the same newspaper described milkshaking as “political theatre” akin to mime artists hired in Columbia to shame dangerous drivers. The intellectual contortions by supposedly serious people to justify physical assault are extraordinary.

…In our tinderbox times, threats are moving from online to the real world. Hear racist insults often enough on Twitter and you may feel entitled to scrawl a swastika on a synagogue or rip off a woman’s hijab on the bus. Yet how can we condemn such crimes and sanction others.

Increasingly activists of all hues believe they have moral licence. A man who threw an egg at Jeremy Corbyn declared “his civil rights were violated” because parliament had failed to deliver…

…Our political maelstrom, like a centrifuge, is flinging moderates out to the extremes of left and right…It takes tenacity to cling to the middle, with dull, old-fashioned beliefs that all political violence is wrong. How complacent we are about our peaceful country, stable democracy and largely safe streets. But if we reject the universal values that underpin them during this period of flux and uncertainty they are far from secure.

Moral licence creates a moral vacuum. As in that famous Mitchell and Webb sketch, the Nazis hate to think they’re the bad guys.

(Janice Turner, The Times, 2019)

Interesting article. “All political violence is wrong.” Now there’s an excellent subject for debate. Was the attempted assassination of Hitler wrong? Was the French Revolution an immoral uprising? Morally, can political, social or economic change only be achieved through peaceful means? Didn’t Nelson Mandela’s ANC party in South Africa use violence? What about the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq?