I had a number of reactions to my column last week “The Limits of Political Decency”, that I decided to explain more in this column. Morality and Ethics were six-unit subjects in my undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Psychology, and while I did not ace them, I passed under extreme professors like Dean Pascual and Dean Majul. These were later inputs in my personal and professional development as a manager, businessman, and columnist.
Most people think morals and ethics are the same and use them interchangeably. They are closely related but aren’t substitutes for each other. Morals and ethics come from Greek words and are nouns. Morals translates as customs while ethics translate as character. In discussions and usage over the years, the best way to differentiate them is to define morals as the allowable standard or limits of behaviors within the boundaries. Ethics is the specific set of rules and actions within the boundaries. Morality is the big fence around human behavior, while ethics is all the specific actions outside and inside the fence. Unethical and immoral if the specific action goes beyond the fence, and varying degrees of morality as the actions bumps the fence. That’s why we say that some actions are within moral bounds.
All elections have moral and ethical considerations as political actions push the limits of moral boundaries. The coming 2022 elections will be no different, but may be even be more morally and ethically complicated due to the characters/reputations of the candidates, the increasing involvement of religions, the moral and ethical excesses of the current administration, and technological advances in communications, that disperses and magnifies amoral, immoral and unethical political behavior. This early, the issue of the morality and ethics of vote buying are making the news, with bishops contending that selling votes may not even be a sin under certain conditions. The ethical consideration is if the act of the buyer and the seller is ethical even if it’s within the moral boundaries. Of course, there are worse political offenses beyond the moral boundaries like killing and terrorism, that are truly sinful and undermine society, that we should be more concerned about and condemn. Then there is the issue of atonement and retribution which is relevant to the Marcos abuses, corruption, torture, and killing during martial law. These were all immoral, amoral, and unethical actions beyond all boundaries, but the non-acknowledgment of the children, their lack of atonement, and retribution, are these immoral or unethical?
Information technology has enhanced political actions and subjected them to more scrutiny. It has improved judgment and condemnation and eventual justice in elections or revolutions. Lord Cromwell got away with genocide in Ireland because it took months or years for the world to know, but we knew about the Mamasapano massacre and the killing fields in Cambodia within days, and reacted and prevented further atrocities. Technology is and will be good for morality.
Let me end this column with specific examples of morality and ethics. When President Garcia lost the election in 1963, a general told him that he can declare martial law if he doesn’t want to step down as they control three divisions of the army. Without hesitation, he said no because it’s not the moral thing to do. A friend who ran as congressman in 1990, was asked by his bodyguards if he would allow them to kidnap the courier of his opponent for two days so he could not deliver the money to the leaders, decided to say no because it wasn’t the moral thing to do. The marathon runner who could have won if he hadn’t stopped to guide the confused leader of the race to the finish line, when asked why he did it he answered “what would my mom think of that?” This was the ethical thing to do.