All those ethics seminars: A waste? Raul Pangalangan Philippine Daily Inquirer
January 16, 2009
The newspaper headline gave the bad news that the World Bank had blacklisted three Philippine construction firms for corrupt practices, but on closer reading, the body showed even more awful news. The WB barred only seven such firms worldwide: Three were Filipino, and a fourth, though Korean, was caught with its hand in the till in a Philippine project. Even worse, the papers earlier reported that international agencies had frozen anti-corruption funds meant for the Office of the Ombudsman. One can only surmise the irony if anti-corruption money was withheld from an anti-corruption agency because of fears that the funds might get stolen. Where does it end?
It is welcome news, however, that corruption has become an international issue. Local elites are no longer completely free to prey at will in their own turf, and can be made to answer by global agencies beyond their power to bully and coerce. But there is a flipside to the globalization of the anti-corruption campaign: they fail to address the local cultures in the language the locals truly understand.
The Philippines is the best example. How many anticorruption laws have been passed? How many new institutional checks and balances do we create each year, because last year’s version failed and has to be backstopped by a newer one? Has corruption declined since we began those reforms — or on the contrary has it increased in both scale (as in “Sec, may 200 ka dito” [Secretary, there’s 200 for you here]) and height (as in Commission on Elections Chair Benjamin Abalos addressing that line to Economic Planning Secretary Romulo Neri, then Neri reporting it to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and Ms Arroyo, apprised of the crime, doing nothing). Come to think of it, remember that the key figure in the Court of Appeals bribery scandal was a professor of legal ethics — and all he got from the Supreme Court was a slap on the wrist!
Let me focus on the last desperate anticorruption measure: ethics seminars for government officials. Desperate, because we have passed all the laws we would need: the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, the Forfeiture of Ill-Gotten Wealth Law, the Code of Ethics for Public Officers, the Money Laundering Law, the Plunder Law. We have created the anti-graft court Sandiganbayan, the Office of the Ombudsman, and now an anti-graft panel under the President. Whenever I read this litany, my eyes glaze over — the “MEGO” effect that writers dread.
These seminars fail because we Filipinos treat them the way we do church sermons. We sit and listen passively, and then we rush out to the parking lot and fight tooth-and-nail to be the first out and on to the mall. These seminars assume that Filipinos learn ethics through a catechism of fixed questions and categorical answers, “no ifs, ands or buts,” no grey areas between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, as if there is a bright line that separates the path to heaven and the path to hell. This pedagogy has terrible consequences.
One, it limits the work of the teacher and the duty of the student or seminar participant. I have heard a teacher of legal ethics say that his only task was to teach the legal do’s and don’ts; whether or not the students actually live by them cannot be taught in the classroom. The classroom can only shape the mind; it cannot reach to the heart which — by the time the student enrolls in legal ethics — is fully misshapen.
That is correct. But consider the other extreme: The teacher who “sermonizes” in class and resorts to shaming or inducing guilt. It might be effective, but doesn’t it smack of moral terrorism that actually makes the student merely obedient rather than moral?
The task of a classroom or seminar is not really to impart the rules, but to teach the student how to see the moral aspects of everyday decisions, the ethical dilemma of each day-to-day encounter. I call this the “recognition of moral choice,” and it is an intellectual skill that is best taught in the seminar room. Notice, however, that the entire post-EDSA People Power 1 mindset conspires against this, because today we prefer to “let the chips fall where they may” and let the law take its course. In other words, we pretend that tough decisions are made merely by the technical application of rules without agonies of conscience.
Two, the effect of this pedagogy on the student or seminar participant is that ethical choices are pictured as black-and-white choices, with little room for reflection and discernment. Thus, to be ethical means either to find an authority figure who will tell us which is black and which is white, or to find the correct party line, so to speak. In other words, it stunts the student’s capacity to make moral choices and once again abdicates that choice to others. It pathetically disempowers us all.
Finally, the seminars don’t work because the attending government officials merely get mixed signals. The official message is contained in the lectures and the thick binder containing the readings. The real message however is contained in the newspaper headlines, which periodically report the most recent scam — a railway here, a broadband network there, fertilizers then, swine funds today — and the guilty get away scot-free. For the honest government official, the true lesson he needs to learn is how to survive without allowing himself to be used by his unscrupulous bosses.
Ethics training seminars will necessarily remain a part of the anticorruption campaign, but we must re-imagine these seminars to attune them to the Filipino way of learning, which includes the peculiar ways by which the Filipino pretends to learn and fools everyone, including himself, that he has kept the faith.
