Ethics, Indigenous Ethics, and the Contemporary Challenge: Attempt at a Report on Ethics for the Filipino Today
Authors: Abulad Romualdo 
Published: October 2022

Classical ethics tells us is that we know through our reason acting as an intellect whether what we do is good or bad. By our nature, then, we can know what's ethically correct. That we do evil is not so much because we do not know it to be wrong; rather, we do wrong despite our knowledge. Thus, if MacIntyre is correct that the Enlightenment philosophers share merely "in the project of constructing valid arguments which will move from premises concerning human nature as they understand it to be to conclusions about the authority of moral rules and precepts," if the project is merely to translate one knowledge to another knowledge, that is, from the knowledge of human nature to the knowledge of moral rules and precepts, then we can very well agree that "any project of this form was bound to fail." Any such project is bound to fail, not only for the reason stated by MacIntyre, that these philosophers are inevitably going to come up with ineradicable discrepancies and divergences, but also because, even should such discrepancies and divergences not occur, the defect lies not so much in its being a matter of knowledge as in its being a matter of desire, that is, not in the intellect but in the will.
References
Ardrey, Robert. After Genesis. London: Collins Fontana, 1968.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. J.A.K. Thompson. London: Penguin Books, 1965.
Arkush, Allan. Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment. New York: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Augustine, St. The Confessions. Trans. Rex Warner. New York: Signet Classics, 2001.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: The Modern Library,1944.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. New York: New American Library Mentor Books, 1958.
Descartes, René. Key Philosophical Writings. Trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, 1997.
_____________. Principles of Philosophy. Trans. Elizabeth Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Donceel, Joseph, trans. A Marechal Reader. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.
Fletcher, Joseph. Situation Ethics: The New Morality. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1966.
Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. Trans. Paulette Moller. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2007.
Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1988.
Gaskin, J.C.A., ed. Varieties of Unbelief: From Epicurus to Sartre. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989.
Hadas, Moses, ed. Essential Works of Stoicism. New York: Bantam Books, 1966.
Hegel, G.W.F. Philosophy of Right. Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008.
_______________. Preview to Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
_______________. Parmenides. Trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London: Penguin Books, 1980.
Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditation: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.______________. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W.R. Gibson. New York: Collier Books, 1962.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Lewis White Beck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Library of Liberal Arts, 1977.
_____________. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that will be Able to come Forward As a Science. Trans. Paul Cairns. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1977.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.
McKeon, Richard, ed. Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House, 1941.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random Vintage Books, 1966.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue 2, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1978.
Lau, D.C., trans. Mencius. London: Penguin Books, 1976.
Lyotard, John Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
McCool, Gerald, ed. A Karl Rahner Reader. New York: Seabury Press, 1975.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Ed. Mary Warnock. London: Fontana Library Collins, 1965.
Plato. The Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. U.S.A.: Basic Books, 1968.
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli and Charles A. Moore, eds. Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Rawls, John. Theory of Justice. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley. London: Everyman’s Library, 1976.
___________________. Social Contract and Discourses on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind. Ed. Lester G. Crocker. New York: Washington Square Press, 1967.
Scheler, Max. Formalism in Ethics and Non Formal Ethics of Values. Trans. Manfred Frings and Roger Funk. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Sen, Amartya. Development of Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Spinoza, Benedictus de. Ethics. Trans. Amelia Hutchinson. New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1949.
Thomas Aquinas, St. Summa Theologica. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Maryland: Christian Classics, 1981.
Ware, James, ed. Sayings of Confucius. New York: New American Library Mentor Books, 1955.