REASONABLE SOLUTIONS OF THE

SOCIAL ORDER: CAUSES OF SUFFERING

FOR THE POOR

Ferdinand D. Dagmang

Efforts to make life more bearable and meaningful aim to make the human
condition more orderly to lessen the effects not only of natural misfortunes but also
of human-made conflicts and adversities. These efforts have come down to us as
common approaches or ways of making life more manageable; these may be part
of a wider popular culture or the more systematic ways of managing the state of
political and economic affairs of a modern/post-modern society. These also provide
moral or ethical standards which every citizen considers as binding or obligatory.
However, products of human minds and hands are always saddled by limits and
flaws. Nothing produced by humans, even the solutions to certain problems, is free
from the fragility of human dispositions, human ambivalence, and the ambiguities
of nature and the social order. All of these cause suffering, especially for the poor.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SHARED RESPONSIBILITY

AND AUTOMATIC ASSISTANCE?

A
utomatic assistance was common to feudal settings where
the lords or masters took care of their serfs’ needs, or heads
of clans or families pooled common resources together to solve
distress-causing scarcities. Responsibility was commonly understood
as a shared one, a property of mutual assistance or solidarity among
members of a society constituted by kinship or community
fellowship – a Gemeinschaft. 1 Capitalism, however, has exerted
undeniable pressures on traditional communities. It has done it through
its organized purposive activities through state regulations2 and through

1. This is not to idealize Gemeinschaft but to illustrate a certain social relationship

which is not common in complex urbanized settings.

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Reasonable Solutions of the Social Order

its reified ethos and practices. Family forms and relations have taken
specific configurations that are consistent with the demands or
requirements of the capitalist productive aspects of life. Capitalism
has slowly shaped individuals and families into precursor cultural
agents of non-traditional identities. The traditional roles/institutions
and their ideological foundations take some shattering blows from
capitalism’s fields, processes, and social and cognitive structures.
Capitalism has shaped and re-shaped shared social patterns and
dispositions from/within which personal embodiments certainly take
their mold. These occupy the front seat in transforming not only
production and expenditure/consumption relations but also former
patterns of enduring bodily and psychic dispositions.
The breakdown of feudal institutions (lordship, vassalage,
fiefdom, tenancy and the centrality of the land and patronage-fidelities)
and other traditional socio-cultural arrangements of nineteenth century
Europe were in no way caused by a single factor. Nevertheless, it is
easy to identify industrial capitalism which has evolved around the
centralized production units as the single most powerful and
fundamental trigger leading to socio-cultural breakdowns. These
breakdowns have taken many paths and have produced many forms
which engendered various social ills or perceived social ills. Various
scholars have identified those ills as alienation, anomie, class conflicts,
neo-colonial domination and dependence, civil apathy, possessive
individualism – all pointing to breakdown of bonds leading towards
collapse of solidarity.
The shift from the household-type to factory-based industry
has not only disturbed and split the household from their members
but also from its traditional culture that has cradled it for generations.
The capitalist factory industry is founded on totally different principles
which have caused no small negative effects on traditional principles
like kinship automatic solidarity and informal neighborly mutual help.
Automatic assistance is now confined and constricted within
families and especially within the shrunk family setting, the nuclear
family. The suffering outside the family or household is no longer
one’s responsibility. Blood and intimate relations have provided the

2. Cf. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, vol.
1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 375ff.

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grounds and boundaries for automatic assistance to the needy. Social

suffering has become subject to this acceptable confinement. This is
where one finds the common sense arrangement of helping
applicable mainly to relations by blood or affinity. Reaching out to a
suffering but non-family-member will always pass through some
conditions built by automatic assistance.
All other forms of helping behavior will pass through the format
of calculation whether coming from the state, churches, NGOs,
workers’ organizations, and other forms of associations. Calculated
assistance looks for some justification in terms of being appropriate
or constructive; it seeks its worthy beneficiaries like the poorest of
the poor or the gifted indigent and rejects the unworthy ones like the
“lazy” or the opportunists.
Most subscribe to the family parameter of automatic helping
behavior. This is the parameter that dictates pragmatism and
calculation as today’s proper approach to helping those outside the
family circle. These are the same values that mold us to become
normal citizens in what is regarded as a normal society. Our society
is also built around the values that, at the same time, impose limits on
helping behavior. It is thus not difficult for many to behave according
to the social habits offered for the development of individuals. Most
of us are already predisposed to behave according to society’s
standards and expectations. Even for those who profess to become
ministers and disciples of Jesus, acting as the neighbor seems to be
truly constrained by common sense and calculation rather than by
impulse of compassion.
Jesus of Nazareth initially directed the attention of his listeners
to a familiar figure of a victim of robbery, an injured person who
thus becomes one of the needy (Luke 10:30-37) – someone who
fits the notion of a neighbor. Every common sense understanding
of the neighbor is satisfied by this identification of the victim as one
in need of help. The moment Jesus brings the priest and the Levite
into the scene, attention shifts away from the needy and towards the
priest and the Levite who are possible agents of assistance. Both
characters stand out but they are not seen as external to the situation.
They are observed and sized up in terms of the presence of the
needy whose predicament clearly appeals for assistance. When that
appeal is twice ignored by the priest and the Levite because of their

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fidelity to religious or ritual requirements, the needy gets more

deprived. This double deprivation magnifies further that meaning
of the neighbor as in need of assistance. The one in need gets more
deprived after the robbery and after the avoidance.
For Jesus, the recurring pattern of inattention and avoidance
must stop. He brings in the person who will initiate a contrasting
series of attention. The Samaritan’s interventions give the needy more
attention than what was probably necessary. Jesus then takes this
extraordinary scenario to emphasize the neighbor-giver meaning
identified through the Samaritan who shatters the ordinary neighbor-
needy definition. Because of the neighbor who gives, the receiver of
help gets more attention and gradually ceases being in need. The
helping neighbor has contributed to the diminishing of the neighbor’s
passive meaning. The sense of the neighbor as active subject definitely
draws thought away from the common sense meaning of the passive
object of help. This also suggests the magnitude of every
extraordinary act beyond norms and ordinary habits of helping.
Jesus urges everyone to emulate the good Samaritan, thus,
avoiding the meaning of neighbor from getting entangled with ritual
avoidance or civilized inattention. For Jesus, to be a neighbor is not
just to be compassionate but also to get past our common sense and
calculations that derive strength from traditions and all that produce
either weary or cynical behavior. Helping requires behaving beyond
the ordinary predisposition.
When Jesus points to the good Samaritan as the neighbor, he
blasts at hearts predisposed to the limitations set by norms. When
Jesus highlights the appropriate action which flows from a neighborly
compassionate heart, he reproaches an attitude that routinely fixes
the neighbor as the needy or the suffering. He has also established
such appropriate action as intrinsic to the meaning of neighbor. He
defines the desirable behavior instead of focusing on the worn-out
meaning of the word – correcting common, economic, moral, and
scientific sense. This behavior gives substance and meaning derived
from impulse of compassion and not from being embedded in
systems. The word neighbor becomes more active and free as it is
coupled with the appropriate and defining automatic compassionate
behavior.

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Our felt compassion, however, does not automatically translate

into neighborly behavior. Compassion is not automatically expressed
since it has been bombarded by habitual or reasoned measurements.
Compassion has become a property of every form of habit or
calculation. Suffering is not something to which we are always able
to respond automatically and with compassion. We reason out or
stay as a bystander (a bystander in a public setting often does not
help because he sees the possibility that other people might extend
their help). Only after counting the cost, assessing the situation or
measuring the benefits do we help or not help. But very often, we
are stuck in our habits and fail to extend our help. The Kevin Carter
case,3 the Jericho Experiment of Darley and Batson,4 and the stranded
fish and the discussants (the fish ending dead because of over-
discussion among those who are “interested” in helping) all point to
this problem.

SOCIAL ORDER: INSIDE EVERY WILL’S DESIRE

My wife and I went to market one very early morning. She did
the buying while I sat and waited in front of a still closed shop. A
greasy man suddenly appeared and sat beside me. I instantly sniffed
a very strong and offensive smell floating in the air. It came from
him and it so powerfully penetrated my nostrils that I could not bear
the smell. It was torture for an asthmatic person like me. I stood up
and left my place, went over the other side of the store and took a
vacant space. But a man was there causing another irritation - a smoker.
I was lucky when his wife appeared from the market and signalled
for him to leave. I was relieved but not for long. The greasy man
was there again sitting beside me. I felt furious; I looked at him with
angry eyes. He looked at me with a blank stupid look. I gave up and
left my place. I found another vacant place that made me happy

3. “Kevin Carter (1961-1994), took his own life months after winning the
Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for a haunting Sudan famine picture.”
http://picturenet.co.za/photographers/kc/, access 30 April 2008. See also http:/
/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Carter.
4. See J. M. Darley and C.D. Batson, “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of
Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 27 (1973): 100-108.

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where the greasy man could no longer sit beside me. There was no
one smoking in that place. I found a space that suited my habit and
expectations. I felt I found my world.
We do not just avoid the obnoxious; we also look for our place,
a choice space to stay calm, clean, peaceful and orderly. We also deal
with people and reality according to the order of things we have
been habituated into. For some who cannot stand a traditional
cosmology,5 a pursuit of a different one may be launched. We have
available sets of constructed cosmologies through millennia of
working, producing, consuming, worshipping, and reproducing.
We do not mind if there is a storm, a part of our bigger cosmos
and something which we can no longer complain about. But we can
somehow complain and do something to ourselves and our cosmos
when an entity is within our reach – something which we can
reorganize, transform, and refit with our abilities. In trying to deal
with contingencies, people try to find ways to resolve the situation
of disorder by making it fit into their sense of order and truth.
People create and are created by their culture. That is what happens
when we think of ourselves as cultured.
Sense of order and truth classifies suffering people into family
obligations, welfare beneficiaries, NGO-dependents, or Church
charity so that reality for normal life is suited to one’s habits and
expectations. Suffering people are thus named for easier handling. It
is a human response to give handles to things that are difficult to
predict and control. The suffering lot are named as beneficiaries of
welfare calculated and allocated by dispensaries such as the state, the
churches, the NGOs, and foundations. Society has assigned and
defined for them a place in the social structure that is fitted into
every sense of order. Mary Douglas’s idea of dirt explains: anything,
including dirt, is proper (“clean”) for as long as it is within its assigned
place.6

5. Cosmology talks about the totality of elements and their connections in a

given order like the universe. In the anthropological sciences, cosmos may be
understood as the whole order, one’s socio-culturally ordered reality where one
would find and take one’s place.
6. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Ltd., 1966); see also her Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1970).

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Jesus’s neighbor will somehow be forced to follow the social

construction of helping behavior – our familiar relations and habits
thus become the Procrustean bed for all the needy. Jesus will somehow
be forced to accept defeat and so die again in modern and post-
modern hands. After all, “there is only one Christian, and he died on
the cross” proving his point.7 Christian-followers do not seem to
have the capacity to emulate him and thus abandon their common
sense view of the word neighbor. Jesus, of course, was ready to
suffer to show his point.
Most reflections about suffering focus on the common sense
understanding of the word neighbor – the one who suffers and
who is in need. Suffering is something one is subjected to because
of various factors: poverty, discrimination, age, intellect, education,
gender, nationality, ethnicity, etc. The other meaning of suffering as a
product of our common sense or practical approach to a normal
life is not given much attention, i.e., suffering is the contradictory but
integral side of all common sense, scientific, and normative pursuits.
Normal life in society is also a reason why there is so much suffering.
The reason there is so much senseless suffering is that we tend to
stick to normal solutions.

SUFFERING AND SOLUTIONS: SUFFERING BECAUSE OF SOLUTIONS

Most forms of suffering are subjected to a problem-solving

process. They are subjected to actual ritual or response meant to
alleviate suffering or address their causes. Diseases are sometimes
caused by viruses or bacteria. These cause bodily pain, damage or
deterioration no matter who is afflicted. The extent of pain or damage
may depend on one’s stamina, resistance, or financial capability.
Unemployment and poverty as causes of suffering require the
correlate bias for skills or for cash. One suffers because the setting
requires skills or money. The primary cause of suffering is the lack
of skills or money. The setting makes possible for lack of skills or
money to become primary causes. Within a different setting where

7. A reference to Nietzsche: “The very word ‘Christianity’ is a misunderstanding

— in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.” Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Antichrist (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), Sec. 39.

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one could work as unskilled, or one could eat one’s produce, poverty
of skill and cash becomes irrelevant. The order of things, thus, would
either abet or prevent unemployment and poverty as causes of
suffering. In our time and in our setting, if one is not skilled or if one
has no money, one will surely suffer.
Because of our setting, the production of different and multiple
ways of alleviating suffering have attained a machine-like rate. This
does not only reflect the multiplication of desires to alleviate suffering
but also an indication of multiplication of cases of suffering. Some
cases not considered problems before are now treated with
seriousness: overweight, bad breath, body odor, vaginal odor, armpit
color, breast size, penis size, coarse skin, and baldness. Most of these
problems are fused to the individual. Some could qualify them further
as vanity-rooted problems. The solutions offered are, however,
catered to everyone including the poor and the unemployed. Our
setting’s solutions have become centered on individual problems.
Such solutions cause suffering to people who do not have problems
with their penises or breasts. They cause problems to people who
might be unskilled and so unemployed or impecunious and so starving.
But we formulate a question linked to our previous questions: Is that
our problem?
If we allow ourselves to be drawn into the problems of the
unemployed or the impecunious, we might really be disturbing the
status of things which assures us of stability. While if we just deal
with our individual imperfections and odors, we may not multiply
our burdens. To add other people’s burden to ours will destroy our
order of priorities. Not to meddle with their affairs will maintain
our state of affairs. Thus, giving assistance to the needy is not just a
question of time and resources; it is also a question of dissonance
management. Assisting the suffering is itself a problem for most of
us, something which threatens our affective security as well as our
cognitive comforts. We must follow the order of things to avoid
this secondary kind of suffering:

The suffering lot are their own families’ obligations.

Where are their parents? Why are their relatives
not taking care of them? I have my own family
and my own obligations. Let the sufferers take
care of themselves.

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Since the solution to unemployment is education or skills

acquisition, we always say “educate the poor.” “Let the state, the
churches, and the NGOs take care of their education.” “Let them
observe the adage: Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach
him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” But this solution may
become another source of suffering for the skilled if he has no
place to fish and if that place is not available to him or is nowhere to
be found.
Primary effects of poverty and unemployment (starvation,
homelessness, lack of education, etc.) also produce secondary effects
like stress or low self-esteem. While the primary effects cause more
visible damage, the secondary effects can cause progressive invisible
ones. When we avoid them, we are not just avoiding the victims of
poverty and unemployment; we are actually avoiding multiple troubles
to enter into our world. This avoidance saves us from inflating trouble.
But this causes more problems for those who are most affected.
Solutions are also gained as results of balancing or mutual
adjustments between roughly equal forces. If the unrepresented poor
and civil society were not present, what kind of solution will they get
from the fruit of balancing? Most solutions that we take and impose
on those absent others are those that ask beneficiaries to be present
in our order of things. We ask them to integrate into our world of
exchange and consumption. Their entry into our world affords us
some facility for handling. When a person with disease enters the
clinic, the physician is at home to handle the case, diagnose the ailment,
and produce the cure. The social belongingness and stability that we
enjoy are also tools that give so much familiarity to our prescriptions.
We need the familiarity to facilitate diagnosis and cure. This, however,
is another source of suffering for the poor and the unemployed. By
forcing them to become like us, we force them to bind themselves
to a regimen. So that when they are changed, our world will become
more comfortable.
Poor people have their own rituals and norms that provide
compensatory and coping means in the face of adversities. If these
cultural elements are far, invisible, or even “erased” through our
integrating or civilizing processes many things could happen. The
old forms (poor people going to their indigenous healers; hungry
ones looking for their extended family; the unemployed pulling some

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friendly strings, etc.) may be forced to be de-traditionalized. The

poor may no longer regard them as traditions because of the newer
traditions (formal, legal, contractual, scientific) which they have to
learn and internalize and consider as obligatory. The new traditions
may not provide them sufficient means to deal with adversities. The
new traditions may become sources of new forms of suffering
which need (e.g. debate about religion/ritual as opium for stress and
non-compliance of ritual as new source of stress)8 rituals that are no
longer there. More secularized rituals (like Jollibee meals, graduations,
promotions) could become double stressors. They cause cyclical stress
that search for a deeper connection with others through common
rituals. But many of these common rituals have become dull and
maybe are not always available because secularized rituals have
proliferated and have become more significant for person-centered
individuals. Our offer of escape, in fact, offers new lines for the
poor’s recapture.

MINISTERS OF SUFFERING: ANOTHER SOURCE OF SUFFERING

Individuals expect so much from their surroundings and from

other people. Inasmuch as their inner world has expanded, they
naively expect that the expansive inner world of other individuals
are ready to accommodate their faults and stupidities. Transactions
are ever presumptive of absorptive capacities, when in fact, reactions
to another’s presence recalls more of the protocols before one could
enter into the world of the other. This is true even when one talks
about friendship, intimate relations, and ministerial relations.
Priests, by their vow of chastity which presumes a person’s identity
is always available to everyone, are not immune to assumption of
individual rights to erect borders against external intrusions. This they
learn even when still young, that is, before having entered the seminary.
Religious vows could not assure an automatic transformation towards
availability and openness to service. Availability and openness to

8. See George C. Homans, “Anxiety and Ritual: The Theories of Malinowski

and Radcliffe-Brown,” in William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, eds., Reader in
Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, 4th ed. (New York: Harper and
Row, 1979), 57-62.

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service are things which no one has ever been assiduously culturally
initiated to as a child by parents or guardians. Agency cannot beg
questions.
The rituals dispensed by the parish are not necessarily common
activities in the sense of shared and community-planned programs.
They are mostly fixed rituals, almost unconsciously followed. They
demarcate the moments that consequently allow ample private time
for the priest. The priest’s scheduled rituals have also the effect of
clearing space and time for privacy. Most of the time, he serves
about two hours of commissioned work and outside that is private
time. The minister’s time outside the two-hour required work has
been appropriated for personal use. For those who serve, I may just
cite an instance where ministers can become slaves of the state-of-
affairs of ministering to the needy. I am referring to the dispensation
of surplus-reasons or state-of-the-art ethics.

ETHICS, SCIENCE AND ITS HOPES

Science, which is a male-dominated one, has tried to take control

of the outer and inner worlds. The sense of progress of science has
always been linked somehow to this concern for control and
prediction. Such is the science of welfare not necessarily concerned
with the poor but with controlling and predicting troubles that affect
a normalized society. It has not been successful, however, in mastering
the unintended consequences of its efforts. In every move that it
takes, in every language it deploys, and in every scheme that it
proposes, the total outcome has always gone beyond the scope of
its planning center. As a result, what science has done is to set aside
some contingency measures which try to take care of the unknown
quirks. At the same time, science pursues “progress” through realities
which constantly eludes it.
Nevertheless, scientific discourse and theory do not have enough
capacity to appease itself against the backdrop of its contingent,
both reliable and unreliable nature as well as the expectant humanity
that relies on its efficiency. It somehow reels over its unconvincing
treatment of the many unpleasant consequences and unruly human
drives. Take a look at those drives which constantly seek the lowest
level of tension, i.e., towards homeostasis through food, drink, sex,

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spirituality, or religion. A constant problem troubling people is the

elusive quest for identity and fulfillment. This is not well understood
or handled by science which, at the same time, is caught in its own
limited and contingent language. Science tries to position itself above
people’s yearning for fulfillment. Worse, some people are outside
the spaces which “progress” has shaped for modernity. Science has
its victims whose predicaments refer back to science’s limits. These
victims include the environment, the poor, the elderly, the women,
and the very young. People’s drives and sufferings which are simply
beyond modern science’s language of control and prediction are
also suggestive of the limits of science.
Those limits of science are also the limits of ethics when it poses
itself as a science. Ethics (as ethics of reason) simply cannot avoid
being part of the world of consequential destructions. Ethics can be
limited by its rational armory which, in the first place, has affinity
with every scientific language. Ethics cannot simply collapse drives
into the unethical. Such drives seek fulfillment in the inventions and
promises of science. A rational guide for behavior provided by
ethics is one of these promises. The prestige of ethics is married to
the language of science that has also incited the activation of every
self-seeking drive.
The unconscious and socio-cultural structures, operational and
symbolic, as limits of the tools of autonomous reason remind people
of the constrained nature of their ethics of reason. To a great extent,
a communitarian ethics or the ethics of solidarity hurdles this constraint
through the less-reasonable acts of compassion framed, of course, by
settings that engender effective broader social bonds. We are
reminded here of Pascal’s “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît
point.” –The heart has reasons which reason knows nothing. This
also means “I care therefore I am” contra “I think therefore I am.”
By circumscribing the constructions and destructions of reason
through community acts of solidarity, the desire and the
rationalizations of science or capital are confounded by less-reasoned
compassion à la good Samaritan.
The ethics of the visible and controllable can only deal with
what it really can deal as able people follow the logic and reason of
the clear and distinct ideas and practices. As something clear and
logical, ethics can only be followed as an appeal to an able reason

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that is used to hearing logic and documented reasoning. Since people

only understand what they can, the need for an ethics of understanding
what people cannot as yet understand is still acute. The propositions
of the Greek philosophers, rationalists, empiricists, other philosophers
of intention (Cogito), and the psychologists of the subject-ego, are
all logical for as long as people want them to be understood.
For a rational ethics, some kind of ethical stance which addresses
the need of those whom society cannot control can be looked at.
The needs of the following types of people need attention: the poor,
elderly, sick, homeless, fugitive, beggar, AIDS victim, suicidal youth,
and addicts. They are the correlates of our society’s ways and reason’s
accomplishments. Rational ethics does have a much logical and
reasoned-out answer to offer. But one may ask what logical
propositions can the victims of society understand? Is there anything
that people can show them as reasonable salvation? What would be
the step to convince them of their becoming potential ethical subjects
of their confounding predicament? I suppose not much from the
surplus-reasoning of cogitative or ego-dynamic propositions; except
perhaps from humanity’s less-reasoned compassion that should also
be freed towards solidarity work.

CONCLUSIONS: CONTRADICTIONS AND SURPLUS-REASONS

The unknown, the unknowable, and the open but less noticeable
possibilities defy all attempts in the systematization of an ethics that
is based on what the conscious mind or rational intentionality grasps
as good or as the ground of what is good. Even the most
comprehensive of ethical formulations that one can imagine does
have to bend before that which is impossible to categorize or calculate.
This is because it is cut away from humanity that is preoccupied with
contingencies.
Modernity has produced an optimism based on its visible
accomplishments and capacities for further accomplishments.
However, it has discovered pessimism that springs out from its
destructiveness towards those inner and outer realities that it cannot
arrange. Indicators of its destructiveness include the holocaust, world
wars, ozone layer hole, environmental cooling/warming, resistant
viruses and bacteria, the CIA operations in the Third World, and

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George Bush, Jr. and his Iraq/Muslims. They are indeed challenges
to modernity’s pretenses and misapprehensions. Such contradictions
of modernity/late-modernity have been the stuff of histories of
success and suffering. The middle histories of neither success nor
suffering are tensional states of the two strands which are of greater
interest to ethnographers.
Systematic ethics is based on the belief that the mind – conscious,
aware, intentional – can define what is really good and can assess
what is not good. Systematic ethics, in fact, does reflect a desire
based on visible accomplishments and confidence in its capacities
for more visible inventions. While the majority of humanity suffers
from stress, pain, and frustrations, an ethics based on rational visions
(cf. mission-vision of some agencies) celebrates the presumption
that words about what is good and what is doable good are indeed
invested with power. As this kind of ethics would put before man
and, before worlds so opaque, there is nothing so presumptuous
and so unnoticeable in those powers that produce miseries and
impulsiveness in its inhabitants. They cause more suffering.
If our formulation of ethics is based on the logical speculations
about the good as distinct from what is noticeably not good, it
seems that people are merely touching indicators which can be cleaned
up and be separated from those which people showcase as ethical.
Ethics collapses the unnoticeable (and even the unacceptable) to what
is clear to the mind. Conceiving independently from what is
unnoticeable, ethics can only produce tools and principles for the
healing of a visible wound. People delight in this accomplishment
and make it the basis of the talk about the total person, the good
life, or the good society. But there are more to life’s visible wounds;
the invisible is oftentimes too much for common sense, for the
academe’s scientific sense, and the traditional hierarchy’s normative
sense.
One of the most frustrating things about ethics is the way it
makes sense of or deceives itself about the sufferings and frustrations
of people. It cannot go beyond its utterances simply because, as
self-reflections, it is part of the whole story of accomplishments
and destructiveness. With its propositions for good behavior and
ethical action, it cannot go behind its language. It cannot hide behind

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the rational mind’s tradition that is gripped by the reality of

unnoticeable mechanisms and causes of suffering.
Ethics can no longer rely on influencing the people’s minds
through abstract rational principles derived from or applicable to
what it can control, simply because there are too many things outside
its control. There are far too many people who have more associations
than the abstract ethical principles or norms could move. There is
probably not much reason for surplus-reasoning when the other
needs just a glass of water to drink.

Ferdinand D. Dagmang
Theology and Religious Department
De La Salle University
Manila, Philippines
Email: dagmangf@dlsu.edu.ph

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