Ethics, Indigenous Ethics, and the Contemporary Challenge: Attempt at a Report on Ethics for the Filipino Today

Abstract

Classical ethics tells us is that we know through our reason acting as an intellect whether what we do is good or bad. By our nature, then, we can know what's ethically correct. That we do evil is not so much because we do not know it to be wrong; rather, we do wrong despite our knowledge. Thus, if MacIntyre is correct that the Enlightenment philosophers share merely "in the project of constructing valid arguments which will move from premises concerning human nature as they understand it to be to conclusions about the authority of moral rules and precepts," if the project is merely to translate one knowledge to another knowledge, that is, from the knowledge of human nature to the knowledge of moral rules and precepts, then we can very well agree that "any project of this form was bound to fail." Any such project is bound to fail, not only for the reason stated by MacIntyre, that these philosophers are inevitably going to come up with ineradicable discrepancies and divergences, but also because, even should such discrepancies and divergences not occur, the defect lies not so much in its being a matter of knowledge as in its being a matter of desire, that is, not in the intellect but in the will.