Moral sense, moral lives

The event was billed as a “Roundtable Discussion on Politics, Corruption and Governance” and sponsored by the Asian Institute of Management, Makati Business Club and Management Association of the Philippines.

The title alone would have left me lukewarm, given the many symposia and seminars on corruption and governance, but for the speaker, who was identified as Dr. Arthur Kleinman, director of the Harvard University Asia Center. In order to be sure, I texted back the person inviting me: “Is this Dr. Kleinman, the psychiatrist and medical anthropologist?”

Being a medical anthropologist myself, I knew of Kleinman, whose many books are widely read and used for health programs. But I wasn’t aware that he was now directing Harvard’s Asia Center and that he was working on politics, corruption and governance.

When I learned that it was indeed he, I moved my appointments around so I could attend the talk. It was worth it; the talk provided me with ideas and insights not so much for medical anthropology as for general education and public policies.

I’m going to share two important “takeaways” from the roundtable discussion, as they relate to our battles with corruption and many other social problems. The first is the need to look into how ethics and morality are embedded in culture and the second is the need to look into “lived morality.”

Kleinman himself qualified, at the start of his talk, that he knew almost nothing about the Philippines, having visited the country only once before, in the 1970s. When he flashed the title of his presentation, I became even more intrigued. It read: “Values in Business and Professions in Asia.” Psychiatry, medical anthropology, values, business…. It now looked like a jigsaw puzzle.

Ethics vs morality

But within a few minutes of his talk I began to realize where he was heading. He differentiated ethics, which consists of a normative language, usually of an elite group, from morality or a moral life, which comprises the aspirations of individuals—and I will add aspirations “to be good.”

The problem in many developing countries like the Philippines (and, he said, China) is that the training in ethics tends to use norms coming from western philosophy, and does not look enough at the social conditions that motivate or discourage people in relation to ethical principles.

As an example, he contrasted western ethics (with its emphasis on rules) with Confucian ethics (which is virtue-based) on how one cultivates personhood. The cultivation of personhood emphasizes social relationships or the famous, or notorious, guanxi (loosely translated as “connections”), which have been blamed for China’s massive corruption in business and in politics. But not enough is said about how guanxi relates to family ties and friendships. I’ve also wondered, seeing guanxi among Chinese Filipinos, if it relates as well to quality assurance and trust: If you are in a special relationship, you must deliver quality goods and services, or risk losing the trust of your guanxi—which is something more akin to your relationship with your suki (the person you usually buy from or sell to).

It should not be surprising then if sometimes, ethics may actually seem at odds with lived morality. We see this all the time in relation to what Fr. Jaime Bulatao called, many years ago, “split-level Christianity”—the gap between what should be and what actually happens.

The tendency in the Philippines is to just sigh and say, That’s the way we are and we can’t do too much about it. But Kleinman’s talk challenges us, as we grapple with social problems, to start with those discrepancies, to look at how people deal with real-world problems, and to come up with moral education rather than more training in ethics….

Or in religion, which is how ethics is usually taught in the Philippines. I worry, too, that the conflation of religion and ethics results in an emphasis on “Hala!” and “Lagot!” (Be good because someone is watching, or because you might be punished, if caught).

My readers from the private sector might be interested to know that many government agencies do have training in ethics, for topics as specific as what to do with Christmas gifts! But the emphasis is still on rules and regulations, rather than on the cultural contexts. At the University of the Philippines I’ve been teaching a course on culture and ethics which does deal with these dilemmas.

Cultivating morality

This takes me to the second takeaway from Kleinman’s talk: the matter of cultivating the moral self. How do we deal with ethical dilemmas in our lives?   Asian societies, the Philippines included, are very much “gift-based”—we give things for a multitude of reasons, all oriented toward building up our social relations, our social capital. Apart from the many social occasions (birthday, graduation, anniversary), we also have gifts when we visit, come back from a trip (pasalubong), say thanks for a favor, even “wala lang” (nothing, I just saw it and thought it’d be a nice gift for you).   Sometimes, these gifts can be interpreted as bribes, which is why in government offices we have all kinds of rules about giving and accepting gifts, as well as in forbidding people in immigration and customs from greeting an arriving person “Merry Christmas,” which can be interpreted as a way of asking for merienda.

There is so much more to cultivating the moral self than gift-giving. Kleinman specifically mentioned care-giving as lived morality, mentioning that he took care of his wife, who had Alzheimer’s, for 11 years. The care-giving experience, he said, “deepens our humanity and refines our moral sensibilities.” I suspect that several people in the audience could relate to that observation, especially those from the “sandwich generation” who are raising young children while caring for elderly parents.

Toward the end of his lecture, Kleinman mentioned that medical anthropologists look for the values underlying our practices around health, whether as the provider (health professionals) or the patient. Similarly then, if we are to teach people to “be good,” we need to understand first what values people already have—for example, what Dr. Ed de Jesus, who was at the roundtable, called “familism,”—my family first. On the surface this can be “good,” but we are challenged now to help people realize that familism, as well as our constant emphasis on building smooth social relations (really a form of the Chinese guanxi), can be problematic. Case studies around these values can then be used in schools and companies to help people process their views on usually abstract concepts like fairness and justice, which are what ethics is all about.

Coming right after Pope Francis’ visit, Kleinman’s talk was a reminder that it is important as well to talk about being good, about living morally, from secular viewpoints. For educators, whether in formal educational institutions or in corporate and organizational sectors, we need to recognize how ethics and catechism classes can become so disconnected from people’s lives, as well as their striving to make sense of morality.

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E-mail mtan@inquirer.com.ph.