THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL

Man, the homo religiosus, is both aided and harassed by an awareness of a certain dimension of his
actions. Conscience, as this awareness came to be known by ethicians and moralists, has been a
conspicuous feature of human conduct since the mythical time when man nibbled at the forbidden fruit
in Eden. Indeed, conscience is both a gift and yoke to man. Not very seldom can we find him enviously
contemplating at the amoral innocence of the beasts, at their total freedom from guilt and from the
oftentimes excruciating tasks of decision making; but not very seldom either can we find him blessing
his gods that, unlike the beasts, he is endowed with a capacity to project himself into the
unpredetermined good, towards a tomorrow state for himself and even for the community where he
dwells.

Conscience is not, however, a ghostly and whimsical whisper within the homo religiosus, but his intellect
in the process of making practical judgements concerning the goodness or evilness of his actions done,
or to be done, in accord to some moral principles. If man does something good, it is conscience that
triggers within him some kind of pleasant feelings; and if he does otherwise, unpleasant feelings.

The subsequent feelings of pleasure and displeasure, ordinarily, seems to be a significant

appendage of conscience. These tangible indices of conscience have been linked to it ever since man
acquired the skill of knowing what is good and what is evil; yet their qualitative mode of manifestation
had probably varied in direct relation with the level of development of the cultural morality within
which a conscience is situated. What the erring primitive man dreaded, for instance, was neither the
unpleasant guilt feelings, nor the wrath of his vigilant gods. The primitive man trembled at the fear of
upsetting the natural cosmological order with his sinful deeds, for he had mistakenly identified ethical
evil with material evil. For the primitive man, taboos served as the criteria of his moral conducts and the
magical rites as his atoning act of restoring the supposedly scathed natural order. In the more
developed Homeric culture of the Greek antiquity, this dread for fear became dread for shame. The
philologist and Hellenist, E. R. Dodds named such a cultural morality shame culture. As the moralization
process advanced, dread for shame, in return, developed into dread for guilt.

QUESTIONS ON FEAR AND SHAME

The Filipino morality does not belong to the fear morality type of the primitive man. In his mild
tropical world, where harvest, game and fish abound, and where the rain, and even the stormy seasons
are more or less regular, the Filipino very seldom experiences want and shocks from entirely unexpected
calamities which he may attribute to a prior upsetting of the natural order that is consequent to an
ethical sin committed. The Filipino morality does not also squarely fit into the shame culture type of the
Homeric Greeks. Though the Filipino shares a tinge of this shame culture, as expressed in his
conspicuous word hiya, his shame is anchored on the opposite pole where its Greek counterpart stands.
Whereas the Greek places a highly perceptible stress on the individual, the Filipino, on the contrary,
places the accent on his community. To state it more precisely, if the Homeric Greek abhors moral evil,
it is because evil deeds tarnish his individual reputation. If the Filipino, on the other hand, abhors moral
evil, it is because he does not want his community to see a tarnished kin-folk in him.

If we are to conceptualize Filipino morality in terms of the primitive and the Homeric morality
types, it would appear as a peculiar mixture of fear and shame moralities. Moral evil for the Filipino
entails fear and shame: fear and shame of upsetting a pre-existent social or communal order.

THE BRIDGE BETWEEN TURBULENCE AND QUIESENCE

For developed systems of morality that are closely bound to religions, their criteria for knowing good
and evil are linked to the metaphysical idea of the divine. The scholastic morality, as an example of a
well-developed ethics, acknowledges civil and Church laws as measures of morality. Yet these man-
made laws, in order to be morally binding, must not be at odds with the natural law which is defined as
man’s participation in the eternal law. Eternal law, lastly, is understood as the “eternal divine plan
which ordains and directs all things to their proper ends.” But even in the shame morality of the
Homeric Greeks, the morally good and the morally evil, are in some way or another, connected with the
mythical interventions of their myriad and anthropomorphic deities.

In the case of the Filipino theology, the native supernatural beings are thought to be unconcerned with
the moral affairs of the mortal folks. As the folklore shows us, what the diwatas (fairies), the kapres
(ogre) and nunos sa punsos (old pixies) loathed were not the sinful man, but the reckless wanderer who,
intentionally or unintentionally, had irritated them or who had raised some havoc in their sylvanian
habitations. Such an aspect of the Filipino mythology drives home the point that the good and the evil
of the Filipino morality are not founded on the sphere of the sacred.

For the Filipino, the measure of what is good and evil reside in his inter-subjective views. Such a
generally accepted premise among Filipinologists directly entails that the values of the society
determines for him what is morally good and evil. Since values are relative to a culture, culture now
appears as the foundation of Filipino morality. This does not pose any problem at all if we merely take
culture as the “complex whole which includes laws, customs, beliefs, art, knowledge, traditions, morals,
and all other capabilities which are acquired by man as a member of the society”. In a symposium on
Filipino morals by Fr. Dionisio Miranda, SVD, at the Faculty of Sacred Theology of the University of Santo
Tomas, an essential aspect of culture, not explicit in most of its manualistic definitions was brought out
into the open when he says, “culture, above all, is dynamic culture.” This aspect of dynamism would
have created a sustained mutation and counter mutation in the Filipino’s perception of good and evil.
But in the historical and existential planes no such radical mutations have been observed. There are
quite a number of things that the Filipino valued in the past that are still valued in the present. The
Filipino’s criterion of good and evil, then, is not something founded simply on a dynamic culture.

The cross-section of a collective psyche is oftentimes compared to an ocean: it topmost level are
the turbulent waves of the dynamically changing culture; at its mid-level are the underwater currents of
attitudes and basic value systems which underlie a culture; and its lowermost portion are the quiescent
pools of water that lay unperturbed deep beneath the raging ocean waves, such is the world-view
(Weltanschauung), the relatively still foundation of a culture.

Filipino morality as a peculiar hybrid of fear and shame moralities is ultimately anchored on the
Filipino world-view whose most significant quality as revealed to us by the behavioral phenomenology
and meta-linguistic inquiries of Fr. Leonardo Mercado, SVD, is its being non-dualistic and harmonizing.

DEEPER COGITATIONS AND FURTHER DESCRIPTIONS

The bridge between Filipino morality and Filipino world-view reveals that such a morality is both an
intrinsic and extrinsic moral system. Intrinsic in the sense that the world-view presents itself as an
indwelling tendency of the Filipino to be in harmony with the other members of his community; and
extrinsic in the sense that the inter-subjective harmony and social order determines what is morally
good and evil.

The bridge also reveals that the Filipino morality is not an objective morality. Unlike the ancient
Roman citizen, and perhaps the whole block of westerners for that matter, the Filipino is not so legal
minded. Laws might have existed in the pre-colonial Philippines, yet for the ordinary Filipino those laws
seldom matter. The fact the Philippines never had a well-developed indigenous system of laws partly
proves our assertion. Corroborating this would be the leniency of the indigenous legal system’s
sanctions. Banishment and slavery, as some examples, may sound so harsh, yet historically these
seemingly barbed spikes of the native law were mellowed down by a more elaborate rite of
reconciliation for the banished and absorption of slavery into the more dominant Filipino kinship
structure. The existence of an almost exquisitely fine legal system of the present-day Philippines and its
notoriously miserable implementation are but vestiges of the Filipino’s not so distant past. Such a non-
legalistic frame of mind had, quite naturally, stifled the development of moral objectification.

A crux springs up at this juncture: does moral non-objectivism mean unbriddled subjectivism for
the Filipino? A further reflection will show us that Filipino morality is not at all a subjectivist morality.
Though it is non-objective, its subjectivity is rooted not on a right-oriented individualism but on a duty-
centered communitarianism, which in return is anchored on his harmonizing world-view.

The final description revealed by the bridge between Filipino morality and Filipino world-view would be
the predominance of consequentialism in such a morality. Consequential morality maintains that
specific actions are to be judged from a moral vantage point by considering their actual effect in the
sphere of human living. This means that certain actions are good or evil because of their effects are
either beneficial or harmful to the individual agent and to the society where that individual belongs.
Thus, the actions of the Filipino are judged to be either good or evil from the point of view of its effects:
whether they are constructive of social harmony or not.

Consequentialism in morality, if strictly pursued to its ultimate principles, precludes situational ethics. It
does so because for an individual and for a society, there are always some actions whose real effects are
always, mediately or immediately, beneficial or harmful. Authentic consequential morality goes either
for the actions that immediately result in good effects, or for the actions that both immediately and
mediately produce good effects. The question remains: does consequentialism in Filipino morality
totally preclude situationalism? By considering the Filipino consciousness for causation, the answer
would be no: Filipino morality, to some extent, is situational. The problem here lies in the Filipino’s
basically oriental understanding of causation, which Dr. Carl Gustav Jung referred to as synchronistic
causation. This non-linear concept of causality acts as blinkers that prevent the Filipino from perceiving
the sometimes prolonged operation of cause and effect. Thus, the Filipino ordinarily sees only the
immediate effects, and very seldom the mediate effects, of his moral acts. For instance, if a Filipino has
to choose between two acts, one of which is a cause of an immediate good effect and a mediate evil
effect, and the other of which is a cause of a morally indifferent immediate effect and a mediate good
effect, most likely he will pick up and opt for the first one with its mediate evil effect. Such is the
entailment of his non-linear perception of causation. Hence, the Filipino’s imperfect consequentialism,
founded on his synchronistic idea of cause and effect, admits the existence of situationalism.

WOODLAND TRAILS TO MORAL PROGRESS

The fundamental flaws of the Filipino morality revealed in our reflections are: first, the exclusivist, or the
tribal, undertone of the socially harmonizing tendency of the Filipino, which makes this tendency fragile
and even poorly functional when brought outside the parameters of the originary kin-based community;
and second, its short term and imperfect consequentialism makes it difficult for the Filipino to see that
the authentically good actions are those actions that immediately and mediately preclude evil effects on
him and on his community.
The trails toward moral progress in Filipino morality, then, must include the paths leading to the
rectification of the aforesaid fundamental shortcomings. To explicate it further, the goal of such
progress must be spelled out so as to cover the attainment of an inclusivist and meta-tribal harmony
and a rigorous consequential morality.

One feasible way of attaining these goals would be the re-construction of the objective criteria of
morality, so as to present them not as burdensome straight-jackets but as moral goads that would lead
every Filipino towards a fuller and richer actualization of his indwelling tendency to social harmony. But
such a projection, like every other specific plan of action needs further and deeper reflections.