Moral crusaders and ethical warriors - CHASING THE WIND by Felipe B. Miranda

The moral and the ethical are mostly the same and it is usually useless hairsplitting to distinguish between the two. Both are concerned with what a community believes to be rightful modes of conduct and, ultimately, with considerations of good and evil.

Still, the language preferred by moralists is not quite the same as that which ethicists commonly adopt. Moralists moralize and morality plays insist on a clear statement of moral lessons which their proper audiences must learn. Ethicists usually are less strident and often more inclined to have their own value preferences, however strongly held, subjected to critical examination.

Even as ethicists, like moralists, have the firmest personal conceptions of what ultimately must be right or wrong; they generally are far more inclined than the latter to rely on reason, material evidence and probabilistic conclusions more than on revelatory knowledge, sensational allegations and absolute truths. Consequently, ethicists are not prone to early conclusions about the nature of good and evil in any particular case and do not rush to invoke Archangels and denounce Satan in specific controversies of a public nature.

These traits are most interesting when one finally reflects on the identification of most ethicists with a community’s ethos or fundamental character, that which underpins and usually is even more resistant to change than the community’s mores or traditional usages. Systems of morality often have a political character as when a dominant class, alien or native, forcefully imposes behavioral requirements on a community even as the latter’s ethos may not easily accommodate it.

On the surface, the religiously and politically correct might be perceived after some time as the customary mores of a society like the Philippines — as comprising its pervasive system of religious and political morality — but deep down the people may be shown as behaviorally resisting these superficially acknowledged mores because their basic ethos persists and often resists the superimposed morality. Filipino Catholicism and Filipino democracy should be re-examined from this perspective. Too many religious tenets as well as political principles are violated or ignored by too many Filipinos who profess to be Christian and democratic.

Without recognizing the persistent dynamic tension between a nation’s undeniable ethos and its socially indicated mores, one would erroneously view Filipinos — particularly those whose socialization excluded either prestigious universities and foreign finishing schools — as largely uneducated, miseducated or simply insensitive to moral corruption and its parallel occurrences in the religious and political realms. Filipinos who belong to the upper 10 percent of all families, income-wise, probably already think this way, leading many of them to agree with denunciations of a public suffering from a "damaged culture" syndrome.

Nothing is probably further from the truth. Filipinos would be both ethical fighters and moral crusaders if the combination were now possible. However, in a society where the rules often obfuscate the distinction between good and evil because the rules themselves are preferentially read for a few and implemented at the expense of most, the crusade for the good against that which is evil is not going to go too far.

In a country where spiritual advisers counsel the electorate to take proffered money and yet vote as their "conscience" dictates, or to accept jueteng money even as they fulminate against all forms of gambling, people learn fast enough that their "conscience" need not dictate too much and that jueteng may be ingenuously re-classified as everyman’s "recreation." The moral dimension, depending principally on considerations of ambiguous delineations of good and evil, does not get to excite too many people.

The stronger and far more critical sense among Filipinos is the ethical precisely because their community’s ethos has been sensitized to a long history of enduring injustice, to systematic unfairness which most people have had to suffer across the centuries. "Good" and "evil" themselves have become meaningful largely only within this context of fairness and unfairness. Multiple wives and mistresses (as well as husbands and misters), the entire illegal system of jueteng, even graft and corruption and mostly everything associated with the spoils of politics are no longer in themselves enough to incite most of the citizenry towards public outrage.

Moral crusaders are going to be most effective with a much smaller group of Filipinos than ethical fighters whose comprehensive base is no less than the entire nation. President Estrada’s resignation is probably largely still his personal decision while his impeachment and conviction — or acquittal — is mostly a matter of Congressmen and Senators responding to the pressure that the advantaged in Philippine society can bring to politically bear on them. Resignation and impeachment may reserve a critical role for moral crusaders. However, the ouster of this President — or his ultimate vindication — hinges not so much on whether he has been "good" or "evil" but on whether Filipinos judge him to have been "fair" or "unfair" to his national constituency. "Fair" simply means he has involved them enough in whatever he has undertaken and shared enough of whatever has resulted from his efforts with them. "Unfair" means that he has been like most Philippine Presidents, using the nation much but not serving it enough.