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War On Drugs in The Philippines (The Greatest Happiness Principle of Jeremy Bentham)
War On Drugs in The Philippines (The Greatest Happiness Principle of Jeremy Bentham)
Drug addiction is not only a domestic problem but also a worldwide issue. Its rapid
increase from being the cause and effect of the problem is one of the main reasons of the
unstable and slow development of the country. Rampant consumption of illegal drugs and
criminal acts related to drug addiction are some of the major problems faced by the Philippine
society.
The Philippine government is fully aware of the menacingly increasing cases of drug
abuse within the country; thus, it has been very rigid in the fight against the cause. Most of the
drug users in the Philippines are young people. Illegal drugs that are present include marijuana,
LSD, opiates, and barbiturates. Since Rodrigo Roa Duterte became the president last year, his
brutal campaign against drugs has claimed thousands of lives. Human rights groups say he is
guilty of crimes against humanity, yet that is scant comfort to those mourning loved ones.
Today, there are already various anti-drug laws, agencies and campaigns created by the
national and local government to address drug abuse but fighting against the cause is difficult
because illicit drugs is not only a mental-disease but now classified as related to commission of a
Baes, Aldrin Paglinawan
GRSS 200 Philosophy and History of Social Sciences
Jose Alejandro S. Tenorio, PhD
crime. Research carried out on drug-related crime found that drug misuse is associated with
various crimes that are in part related to the feelings of invincibility, which can become
particularly pronounced with abuse. Problematic crimes associated include shoplifting, property
crime, drug dealing, violence and aggression and driving whilst intoxicated.
A study made by Dr. Lance L. Simpson from Columbia University College of Physicians
and Surgeons, he said more than 200 acts of felony in Manhattan over the last two years says he
has proved an assumption he set out to test: that people who commit crimes while under the
influence of drugs behave differently from those who commit the same crime while not under the
influence of drugs.
This is the reason why President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the police to end drug
addiction in the Philippines by conducting operations that will rehabilitate those people who are
using illicit drugs. He also sees that drug dealing and addiction is a “major obstacles to the
Philippines’ economic and social progress.” The dominant drug in the Philippines is a variant of
methamphetamine called shabu. According to a 2012 United Nations report, among all the
countries in East Asia, the Philippines had the highest rate of methamphetamine abuse. Estimates
showed that about 2.2 percent of Filipinos between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four were using
methamphetamines, and that methamphetamines and marijuana were the primary drugs of
choice. In 2015, the national drug enforcement agency reported that one fifth of the barangays,
the smallest administrative division in the Philippines, had evidence of drug use, drug trafficking,
or drug manufacturing; in Manila, the capital, 92 percent of the barangays had yielded such
evidence.
By early December, nearly 6,000 people had been killed: about 2,100 have died in police
operations and the remainder in what they called “deaths under investigation,” which is
Baes, Aldrin Paglinawan
GRSS 200 Philosophy and History of Social Sciences
Jose Alejandro S. Tenorio, PhD
shorthand for vigilante killings. There are also claims that half a million to seven hundred
thousand people have surrendered themselves to the police. More than 40,000 people have been
arrested. Although some human rights organizations and political leaders have spoken out
against the crackdown that Duterte has been relatively successful at not having the legislature
If we will apply and analyze the ethical theory of utility, it describes the sum of all
pleasure that results from an action, minus the suffering of anyone involved in the action. Jeremy
Bentham also believes that human beings are intrinsically bound to seek pleasure and avoiding
pain, and the concept of what is "good" and "bad" are defined by what is pleasurable and painful
to human. If we will believe that for every action, there will be a reaction from other people and
that our prevailing principle will not act in any way which results in a negative or detrimental
Applying this principle in a crime, we could say that one would not commit an offense
likely to mean one suffered more pain for committing the act, than the possible pleasure one
might derive from it. To secure desirable behaviour and to deter undesirable, society might
Baes, Aldrin Paglinawan
GRSS 200 Philosophy and History of Social Sciences
Jose Alejandro S. Tenorio, PhD
respond to this theory by imposing the most stringent set of laws and punishments possible. But
this would not be a Benthamite solution. The object of legislation, according to Bentham, should
be to secure the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. The pain of punishment
should, therefore, be proportional to the happiness that it secured. To set everything clearly, laws
are created not to confer pain to the people but to secure the greatest happiness of everyone from
The war on drugs has received a high level of popular support from across the class
spectrum in the Philippines but it led to the deaths of over 12,000 Filipinos to date, mostly urban
poor. At least 2,555 of the killings have been attributed to the Philippine National Police. Duterte
and other senior officials have instigated and incited the killings in a campaign that could amount
to crimes against humanity. If we will quantify the negative implication of this war on drugs of
President Duterte, it seems that people is treated as means to an end. It makes people do the right
things for the wrong reasons. It assumes we have a common human nature with common desires.
It leaves no room for individual tastes, or for some people to value highly something that others
might think is of no account at all. The question that we should answer here is that who is the
right person to decide what is better or constitutes the greatest good to everyone? All ideas are
subjective, created in each of our minds. Who are we to decide other’s fates? The only just way
to increase utility is through non-violent action via persuasion by the power of ideas and words.
References:
Bentham, Jeremy (January 2009). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Bentham, Jeremy (2001). The Works of Jeremy Bentham: Published under the Superintendence
Mill, John Stuart (1998). Crisp, Roger, ed. Utilitarianism. Oxford University Press
Internet Source
https://peterwicks.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/the-pros-and-cons-of-utilitarianism/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/
http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/courseblog/files/2011/03/michel-foucault-panopticism.pdf
http://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1564&context=theses
http://www.philstar.com/opinion/2017/09/04/1735640/war-drugs
https://www.cfr.org/interview/human-rights-and-dutertes-war-drugs