Cruise ships in Haiti and misdirected moral outrage

Today’s Guardian seemed very keen that we be morally outraged that wealthy tourists are visiting earthquake-stricken Haiti in cruise ships. The precise justification for this disgust, however, isn’t really very clear. I’m happy to concede that one thing highlighted in the story – the fact that the Labadee resort where the Independence of the Seas has moored is essentially a privatised stretch of the country’s coastline, from which ordinary Haitians are barred – is clearly quite worrying. And intuitively there’s clearly something we find pretty disquieting about rich white people sunning themselves in a tropical paradise while untold thousands of dead and injured are being rescued from earthquake rubble a few short miles away, but, well…why? Would it be less bad if the Independence of the Seas had instead stopped off a short distance down the coast in the Dominican Republic (the nation which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti)? Or should it have gone to a neighbouring island? How close is too close when you’re on holiday near the site of a natural disaster? And does it just apply to natural disasters? What about places where people live their entire lives on the brink of starvation, completely in the absence of earthquakes or other similar hazards? Is it OK to holiday anywhere near there?

Image: adactio/flickr

There’s undeniably something deeply wrong with a world where some endure terrible suffering and deprivation while others essentially live lives of luxury. I’d say agreement with that statement is a bare minimum requirement for anyone to be able to plausibly describe themselves as even vaguely of the left. But what the hell is the moral relevance of the geographical distribution of the rich and poor? I don’t see how rich people happening to temporarily be located closer to the extremely poor makes the global distribution of wealth any less acceptable, any more than moving said rich people further away again would magically make the world we live in more socially just.

Image: United Nations Development Program/flickr

As with so many other news stories, this one, while it purports to be about the tragedy in Haiti, is All About Us. I suspect that most of us, regardless of political allegiance, feel deep down that there’s something deeply unjust about the level of global poverty and deprivation when we in the rich world have so much (and, more pertinently, could potentially do so much to help – through campaigning and donating to charity). But, most of the time, we shut it out. Haiti, as I mentioned in a previous post, was in a pretty horrendous state well before the earthquake, and that fact didn’t do much to stir our consciences. But when that poverty is made immeasurably worse by a natural catastrophe, and when we see pictures of rich white People Like Us holidaying just next door to the disaster area, then the injustice becomes a little harder to ignore. So we avoid facing up to it by working up a nice bit of moral outrage to direct at the cruise passengers, when their only crime is being as privileged as us in a part of the world that’s closer to the devastation than we are.

(Once again, if you want to donate money to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti, you can do so at the Disasters Emergency Committee website)