Ethics in crisis

THAT’S a beautiful way of saying an ugly reality. More and more people, even our educated ones, do not know anymore the nature, meaning and purpose of their actions. Or at least their knowledge is saddled with grave distortions.

Look at the recent Vicente Sotto Hospital scandal. As more data emerge, the more absurd the whole affair appears. It’s kind of funny, but in a bizarre way, since it is betraying a deeper, more serious crisis in us as a people.

The predicament we are in is that we seem to have lost touch with the proper sense of ethics and morality. Each one acts solely on his own. Now there’s really nothing wrong with that. That’s unless we highlight the modifier, “solely.”

While it’s true that as persons we are free to do anything, we seem to have forgotten also that as persons we are meant to be responsible for our actions. Freedom and responsibility are essentially inseparable.

Freedom and responsibility are precious human values that need to have their proper grounding and orientation. Without this condition, they can become very dangerous forces wreaking havoc in their wake.

Ultimately, we have to bring in the question of God, of where our faith finally rests in, of whether we have a proper understanding between the roles of faith and reason.

Ultimately, we have to know who and what we are to also know how we ought to act. These questions lead us to the answer of where we ground and orient our freedom and responsibility, and thus, our ethics and morality.

At the moment, there seems to be a good reason to doubt whether many of us know the significance of our actions, that is, of our human acts, those for which we are responsible, since we do them knowingly and willingly.

Our human acts are supposed to reflect our person and build it up. They can define us, make and unmake us. They are integral to our person. But now, signs are aplenty that indicate that these acts are detached from our person.

They have become purely mercenary, highly corruptible and often done at the behest of questionable motives. Without due reference to our person, and much less to God and to an absolute law, our actions are at the mercy of any motive and intention.

The only prevailing law that seems to rule our sense of ethics and morality is that we can do absolutely anything as long we don’t get caught, we don’t create a public mess, we avoid directly and physically hurting people, and things like those.

That’s at the initial stage, since if this mentality is made stable it surely will descend in a slippery slope toward more bizarre and grotesque forms of ethics and morality.

It’s a highly subjective mindset that makes each one of us our own law and lawgiver. The only consolation is that so far, at least in our country, we are not yet in the stage of formally and systematically rationalizing this attitude.

In the West and in most developed countries, this kind of cankerous thinking is getting dominant. And thus, what in a normal peaceful world are considered taboos and perversions are now regarded as garden-variety.

Infidelity is ok. Sex outside marriage is ok. Notice the number of celebrities who openly talk about coupling and uncoupling with sophisticated insouciance and nonchalance as if nothing’s wrong. In fact, it can sound elegant and cool.

In some avant-garde sectors, they have so discarded any restraint to the total loss of the ethical and moral sense that they are now into what is called as nihilism. That’s the belief that everything here in life really amounts to nothing.

This ism, together with its contrary counterpart like fanaticism, is what makes people prone to fall into terrorism, since life here offers them no meaning and reason to live.

We have to be wary of these developments that are taking place quietly and subtly in our world today. And all of us are duty-bound to do something about this.

The sense of ethics and morality should be restored, strengthened and defended. The challenge and requirements it demands should be faced and met squarely.

This means a lot—praying, sacrificing, recourse to sacraments, catechesis, ascetical struggle, developing virtues, sanctifying one’s work, doing apostolate, etc.