The Filipino Concept of Justice

Jose W. Diokno
We have been dominated by the West for so long; our
political institutions, our laws, our educational system,
all are copies of Western patterns; and the advertising,
television programs, books, magazines and newspapers
emanating from the West have deeply affected our values. In
these circumstances, can we hope to find a concept of
justice native to us Filipinos?
I suggest that we can, if we look to our language and
to our history.
Tagalog, Ilongo, Cebuano and Pampangos use a common
word for justice, katarungan, derived from the Visayan
root, tarong, which means straight, upright, appropriate,
correct. For us, therefore, justice is rectitude, the
morally right act; and also because it connotes what is
appropriate, it embraces the concept of equity, for which we
have __ native word, and for which on the rare occasions
that we use the concept, we employ the Spanish derivative
ekidad.
For right, we use karapatan, whose root is dapat,
signifying fitting appropriate, correct. The similarity in
waning of the roots of our words for right and justice
indicates that, for us, justice and right are intimately
related.
On the other hand, for law we use batas, a root word
denoting command, order, decree, with a meaning disparate
form that of the roots of our words for justice and
right. Our language, then, distinguishes clearly between
law and justice; it recognizes that law is not always just.
In this our language resembles English. English also
links the words justice and right. Since it derives
justice from the Latin ius which means right; and
separates justice from law since it derives law from the
Old Norse word log, which means something laid down or
settled. But English does differ our language in two
respects; our term for justice, katarungan is native to us,

but the English term is imported, our word for justice

includes the concept of equity, the English word does not.
On the other hand, we use the same word kapangyarihan
for power: and for authority; and this creates a similar
ambiguity, for it could mean that power confers authority or
that authority confers power or that power ought to to be
divorced from authority. Lately, however, we have tended to
be more and more to distinguish between naked power and
authority using the Spanish poder or the Tagalog lakas which
means strength, intensity to signify naked power, and
kapangyarihan to signify authority.
Two more points need to be made. One is that our
language employs the same word, katarungan, for both justice
and fairness, is it does for both justice and equity. And
although we use a native word, karapatan, for right, we use
a Spanish derivative, pribelehiyo, for privilege. So it
seems logical to conclude that the fundamental element in
the Filipino concept of justice is fairness; and that the
privilege and naked power- two of the worst enemies of
fairness are alien to the Filipino mind.
The last point is that Taglogs have a root word tuwid
that is an almost exact equivalent of the Visayan root
tarong. Yet, Tagalogs chose tarong as the soured of our word
for justice, katarungan; and use tuwid to form katuwiran,
meaning straightness (not rectitude), and katuwiran or
katwiran, meaning reason, argument, with overtone of selfjustification or excuse an in mangatwiran, magmatuwid, and
cognate words. So we Filipinos know that not every
justification is just.
In summary, our language establishes that there is a
Filipino concept of justice; that it is a highly moral
concept; intimately related to the concept of right; that it
is similar to, but broader than, western concepts of
justice, for it embraces the concept of equity; that it is a
discrimination concept, distinguishing between justice and
right, on the one hand, and law and argument, on the other;
that its fundamental element is fairness; and that it
eschews privilege and naked power. By what standard should

we judge the content of laws, policies and institutions

that seek justice in the Philippines?
The first standard is that every law, policy and
institution must, if it cannot prompt, both the individual
rights of man and the collective tights of the people.
The rights of man are set out clearly and
comprehensively in our constitution, in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and its two implementing
covenants, and in sundry declaration of the United Nations
on torture, on slavery and forced labor, on refugees, on
territorial asylum; on the right of the child, on the rights
of mentally retarded persons and the like. Respect for these
rights is essential if we are to approach the Filipino
aspiration for freedom.
The rights of the people have only recently achieved
legal recognition. People as national communities have three
basic rights; and the right to survive the right to external
and internal sovereignty; and the right to development. From
these three basic rights flow freedom from aggression and
from intervention in internal affairs; the rights to
territorial integrity, police independence, sovereign
equality and international social justice the right freely
to choose their economic, as well as their political, social
and cultural systems, and the means and goals of
development, without outside interference in any form
whatsoever, full, permanent sovereignty over all national
wealth, natural resources and economic activities, which
includes the right to regulate and supervise foreign
investment and the activities of transnational corporations,
and to nationalize, expropriate of transfer ownership of
foreign property; and finally, the economic and social
consciousness, thereof, as a prerequisite for development.
But given the present condition of Philippines society,
these standards are not enough.
In addition to the denial of human rights and of the
peoples rights, our society today is characterized by a
third malady, poverty and inequality. What the degrees of
poverty and of inequality are, and whether they are abating

or increasing may be disputed- but not even the most

obsequious follower of what used to be called a new society
and is now called a new republic (as if the world new were
a perfume that overcomes the stench of the old), no one I
repeat- could honestly deny that there is too much poverty
and too much inequality in our land.
Nor could anyone honestly deny that this poverty and
this inequality are not the fault of the vast majority of
those of our people who are afflicted by them. In a mixed
bur capitalist-biased economy such as we have, a persons
income is the result of four factors: the amount of incomeproducing property he owns, his skills his productivity and
the market value of his skills. There isnt much any one can
do about the market value. What skills one has, moreover,
and their quality and productivity are products of ones
education, ones preferences and ones health and ones
education is, for the most part, the result of what ones
parents could say for: ones health, the result of what
nutrition ones parents could give one caring the formative
years of childhood. Ones skills and productivity,
therefore, are greatly affected by the wealth and income of
ones parents. So too, is the income-producing property a
person acquires. Property can be acquired honestly by
inheritance or by purchase, or dishonestly by excortion,
bribery, political influence, fraud, or theft. But
inheritance depends on the wealth of parents and as we have
shown, so does, in large, measure, the capacity to earn
income with which to buy property. In short, the poor and
inequality, shame, oppression, exploitation and abusePlutarch pointed this out more that two thousand years ago:
A mere law to serve all men equal rights is but
useless, if the poor must sacrifice those rights to pay
their debts and in the very seats and sanctuaries of
equality, the courts of justice, the office of states,
and the public discussions be more than anywhere at the
book and bidding od rich.
To attain the Filipino concept of social justice, then,
laws, policies and institutions must consciously strive by
effective means.

Two to select a means of developing and using our

natural resources, our industries and our commerce to
achieve a self-directed, self-generated and self-sufficient
economy, in order to produce enough to meet, at first, the
basic material needs of all, and afterwards to provide an
increasingly high standard of living for all, but
particularly for those with lower incomes and to provide
them with enough leisure to participate creatively in the
development and the enjoyment of our national culture; and
Three, to change those relations and structures of
relations between man and man, between groups and between
communities that cause or perpetuate inequality, unless that
inequality is necessary to improve the lot of the least
favored among our people and its burden in borne by those
who (heretofore have been most) favored.
These three standards complete the third part of
Filipino model of social justice.
They embody two different principles: first a principle
of reparation that looks back to repair the (injustice
inflicted by society) on the poor and the oppressed; and the
accompanied(accompanied? Eto yung nakasulat- and the
second and the third) a principle of change that looks
forward (to effect the internal) and external revolution of
which Mabini wrote in order to attain the aspiration that
Jacinto articulated:
That a Filipinos worth who he is should not
depend on what he has.
Neither principle advocates or intends to abolish all
inequality nor to achieve a mathematical identity in sharing
social costs and benefits. I do not think it realistic to
pursue such objectives. Nature, chance and accident do cause
differences; these differences produce inequalities and
though we are achieving more and more control over nature we
cannot change nature, chance or accidents. But we can change
human relations and action; and therefore, we can see to it
that whatever inequalities remain in our society is not
caused by our relations and our actions.

Finally, neither principle seeks to do away with the

government or law. On the contrary, it is through honest
government enforcing just laws that the principle would
attain social justice. I so not know of another way.
We are now in a position to formulate a Filipino
concept of social justice, valid for today and hopefully for
tomorrow.
Social justice, for us Filipinos, means a coherent,
intelligent system of law made known to us, enacted by a
legitimate government freely chosen by us, and enforced
fairly and equitably by a courageous, honest, impartial, and
competent force, legal profession and judiciary, that first,
respects our rights and our freedom both as individuals and
as a people; second, seeks to repair the injustices what
society has inflicted on the poor by elimination poverty a
rapidly as our resources and our ingenuity permit; third,
develops a self-directed and self-sustaining economy that
distributes its benefit to meet, at first, the basic
material needs of all, then to provide an improving standard
of living for all, but particularly for the lower income
groups, with enough time and space to allow them to take
part in the end to enjoy our culture; fourth, changes our
institutions and structures , our ways of doing things and
relating to each other, so that whatever inequalities remain
are not caused by those institutions or structures, unless
inequality is needed temporarily to favor the least favored
among us and its costs is borne by the most favored; and
fifth, adopts means and processes that are capable of
attaining these objectives.
Are these impossible to meet? If you mean meet
completely and immediately, perhaps they are. I do not think
so, yet I concede the point to be debatable. But only
yesterday in world time, it was thought impossible to land
on the moon. And not too long ago, Aristotle, one of the
wisest men, justified slavery as natural and listed torture
as a source of evidence. So standards thought too high today
may well turn out to be too tomorrow. But whether they do so
or not is not really important. Paraphrasing Nikos
Kazantzakis, the superior virtue is not to achieve justice;

it is to fight relentlessly for it. We struggle for social

justice in time, yet under the aspect of eternity.