While the Philippines continues to grow economically, reports indicate that economic expansion has not been inclusive. Millions of Filipinos still rate themselves poor while millions more indicate that they experience hunger. While the government can trumpet programs and projects intended to spur economic growth, the fact of the matter is that these do not necessarily benefit those who belong to the margins of society.
We can begin by looking into patterns of distribution. First, it must be stated that inequality in itself is not bad. The problem is not that all people should be equally well off or equally worst off, as Derek Parfit correctly points out. What is morally objectionable is the kind of situation where people are so poor that they would not be able to acquire the things that they morally deserve.
With close examination, it is easy to suggest that the Philippines still follows the utilitarian pattern of economic distribution. The whole economy creates wealth, but the overall utility of this wealth is based on profit-making. Government planners expect economic goods to trickle down, yet those who are on top of the system exploit their privileged position by taking advantage of various loopholes. For instance, capital is not readily available to poor farmers. In view of this, they fall prey to unscrupulous financiers and traders to whom they are forced to sell their produce at a loss.
From a distributive end, we can look into government services intended to benefit the worst off in society. But before we continue, it matters to say that justice in the Rawlsian sense does not mean that we remove all inequalities. As Will Kymlicka correctly opines, justice as fairness means that we only take away inequalities that do not benefit the worst off. What this means is that only those things that impede equal opportunities for each should be dismantled. For instance, while education is meant to broaden the options of a poor child in life, prohibitive tuition costs for private education and the deteriorating quality of public schools limit the chances of children to a future that they so deserve.
We can look into the human development paradigm as espoused by Amartya Sen and Mahbub ul Haq, which is important in terms of understanding how the expansion of people’s capacities intrinsically and instrumentally help them in attaining a life they “have reason to value.” Sen emphasizes the limitation of using income as the informational basis for assessing human wellbeing. It is for this reason that we have to look into the heterogeneities of people, including their exposure to political conflict and violence. Yet, while the capability approach provides us a broad spectrum in terms of looking into some aspects of people’s lives, massive inequalities still persist in the country.
One of the most plausible propositions with respect to equality is proposed by Parfit in his “priority view.” In a nutshell, it suggests that we cannot allow someone to live in poverty because it is something that he or she does not deserve as a human being. Whether you treat persons differently or equally is not the problem. The world will not be a better place by pulling down those who are on top of us to make them suffer. What is more important is that we help those who are at the bottom of society.
The liberal position is that “equality can never be valued for its own sake.” Justice requires that we allow people to freely pursue their life plans on the basis of talent, skill, or intelligence. It would be counterproductive on the part of any society to limit the abilities of others to attain a life they so desire. Our problem, in this sense, is not that we should make the situations for each equal. Rather, upon closer look, our divided world really is due to the fact that there are abusive people in the system who take advantage of their privileged position.
In this sense, we have to extend our understanding of negative freedom from “noninterference” to “nondomination,” as proposed by Iris Marion Young. Society must consider the fact that relational aspects in the social hierarchy, including cultural and physical contexts, are a source of injustices. When we say that corruption is systemic, it means that the structures themselves are the root cause of the problem.
For instance, a centralized government naturally prioritizes funding the needs of the country’s capital, although this is misplaced in as much as it has not really resulted in an improved standard of living. While federalism is theoretically desirable, the fact of the matter is that it can also create local monsters. They, too, will exploit the people in these new “centers of power.”
Even standards of beauty can be oppressive. And this is because society as a whole contributes to a fraud perpetuated by the manipulative ways of the rule of the elite. Until we share the moral burden of emancipating human society from this type of domination, human suffering will not vanish from the earth.
Christopher Ryan Maboloc teaches philosophy at Ateneo de Davao University. He has a master’s degree in applied ethics from Linkoping University in Sweden.