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Impress me, Convince me: A Call to Those Opposing the RH Bill

Two friends of mine sipped coffee at Bo’s after what to them was a disappointing forum on the RH bill sponsored by the local Catholic Church. They were amazed by the lack of information, the drought of reason, and the argumentum ad misericordiam employed by those who said that the RH bill should be junked. The lady, mother of two, asked, “Why should an intellectual forum on a bill be reduced to an attack to our conscience? Why does the church have to repeat all over and over again that to kill is bad?” His companion replied, “I do not really see the point. I have not seen a provision there that says that the bill can be made responsible for deaths of unborn children. I do not really know what they are objecting about.” “Impress me, convince me.” These were the words that echoed in my mind when I heard the conversation. I heard it first in a reality show looking for fresh new talents, shouted by one of the three judges at a contestant doing an interpretation of Stevie Wonder’s ‘

"The Idea of Justice"

In 2009, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen published his philosophical enquiry on the need for a theory of justice entitled “The Idea of Justice”. Deviating from the famous Rawls document in 1971 “A Theory of Justice”, the book proposes ‘comparative realization’ as an alternative approach to John Rawls’ ‘transcendental institutionalism’. Sen’s conceptualization, as reviewed by Osmani (2010), requires at least 8 elements. In this essay, however, I will focus on at least one element, the process by which we judge how just or unjust our society is. Sen contends that we evaluate the justness of a society, not by the justness of its institutions but by the “justness of the realization of a social state as determined by the interaction of institutions with social norms and the behaviour pattern of individuals living in a particular society” (Osmani, 2010; 604). In his book, Sen argues that it is very difficult to define a perfectly just society. The plurality in the conception of the t

Is Vote Buying Here to Stay?

(this article is the Executive Summary of Michael Canares' paper "The Economics of Local Elections: A Closer Look at Votebuying in the Municipality of Malanoy") Election in the Philippines is fiesta time. It is a very colorful affair strewn with songs and dances, local parties, solicitation papers, advertisements, “bayle”, food and drinks, and even money – cold cash at that. In the Philippines you can see sample ballots pinned with paper bills distributed by “coordinators” the eve before Election Day. And sometimes, in the Philippines , you can see how those paper bills make a difference on election results. While it is an undeniable fact that vote-buying is an accepted and a regular activity in Philippine local elections, there are only a few studies that indicate the propensity, if not the gravity of the problem more particularly in the context of municipal elections, where the relationship of the politician and the voter is sometimes reduced to a

That Knowledge Deficit

I came across a very powerful article by Jeffrey Sachs in The Broker Magazine issue for February 2010. Though I am not his huge fan even when he wrote “The End of Poverty” five years back, I got excited by how bluntly he made a critic on government and the development enterprise regarding the climate change issue after Copenhagen. He wrote, in his final remarks on his essay “Rethinking Macroeconomics” regarding that knowledge deficit in the policy-making halls of governments. I love the lines. This is the reason why I am reproducing it here. “Finally, another fundamental problem of governance is the lack of interface between politicians and ‘knowledge communities’, that is, the communities of expertise in critical areas such as energy, food production, disease control, poverty alleviation, and so on. We have not solved the problem of the proper integration of scientific and technological knowledge in public policy making. The US Congress is nearly scientifically illiterate. This is v

The Problem with Representative Democracy

The Bohol Chronicle reported today (27 December 2009) that the Sangguniang Panlalawigan has given a go-signal for the governor of the province of Bohol to sign a joint venture and development agreement (JVDA) with Oasis Leisure Islands Development Inc. (OLIDI) to reclaim at least 450 hectares by building 5 islets at Panglao Bay. The provincial lawmakers believed that the proposal was advantageous to the government, as it will not spend any single peso for the project, from its inception to implementation. Interestingly, the Bohol Chronicle reported that Vice Governor Herrera stressed that "Several discussions have been made and the SP met with the proponents many times. Concerns of each board member have been satisfactorily answered." I was appalled. It seems that the Sangguniang Panlalawigan members have not read the proposal in its entirety. I wonder if they could answer questions if reporters will ask them for the details of the proposal. I wonder