Ferdinand Tablan

In this paper, I advocate for the integration of systemic racism as a central topic in the education of information technology (IT) students, particularly within Cyberethics curricula. Systemic racism consists of deeply rooted policies, practices, and cultural norms that sustain racial inequality and discrimination regardless of individual intent. It extends beyond personal prejudice to encompass the institutional and structural disadvantages imposed on marginalized racial and ethnic groups. As technology becomes more embedded in everyday life, addressing systemic racism in IT education is essential for developing ethical, socially responsible practitioners. Including these discussions encourages critical thinking among students and helps them understand the broader societal impacts of their work. I propose that college-level Cyberethics courses be revised to incorporate four interrelated key areas that contribute to the perpetuation of racism in information technology: algorithmic bias, the digital divide, digital deficiency, and exclusionary design. Each of these factors reflects how inequality can be unintentionally encoded and sustained through technical systems. If systemic racism is not critically examined in IT education, the cycle between discriminatory technologies and existing racial inequalities will become self-reinforcing. This feedback loop risks making inequality more pervasive and more deeply embedded in both digital and social systems, making future efforts to dismantle these structures significantly more difficult. Minoritized communities will continue to face exclusion and harm unless we take proactive steps to change how we teach and think about ethics in technology.

A number of paradigms have been proposed to understand the sources of meaningful work, but non-Western approaches have attracted little attention. This study aims to make a theoretical contribution toward understanding meaningful work from a virtue-ethics framework that is culturally meaningful and relevant to Filipino realities and their unique historical heritage. It develops a paradigm for a Filipino view of meaningful work that could guide both researchers and practitioners in business ethics by explaining what makes work meaningful, justifying why it is important, and presenting examples of concrete measures that management can utilize to promote meaningful work in the Philippine workplace.

'Big Data' refers to extensive, interconnected datasets that are continuously generated and updated, encompassing a wide variety of sources, formats, and applications. It includes a significant portion of anonymized personal data as well as non-human data, such as derived datasets and by-products produced through everyday digital activities and human-machine interactions. These data points include traces from online shopping, browsing history, search queries, system logs, sensor readings, weather data, and aggregated location data. For the purposes of this study, the term ‘Big Data’ specifically denotes this broad spectrum of data categories, explicitly excluding any personally identifying or legally protected data. By concentrating on these datasets, the study argues that certain forms of Big Data can be governed as shared resources or a ‘common heritage of humanity,’ supporting initiatives like data commons, open data movements, open government data, and data cooperatives, and emphasizing the potential for collaborative stewardship and equitable access for the public good. However, ethical considerations surrounding Big Data are complex due to novel dilemmas arising within the evolving cyberworld. In response, this study draws on the concept of stewardship within Catholic Social Teaching, with particular focus on “Laudato Si’,” and presents it as a guiding ethical principle for responsible data custodianship, upholding human dignity, ensuring accountability, and harnessing Big Data’s potential for the common good. Just as “Laudato Si'” highlights our interconnectedness within the biosphere, this parallels our interconnectedness within the datasphere—the digital ecosystem—underscoring the necessity of stewardship in both domains.

The legalization of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in several states in the U.S. and the growing social approval of euthanasia have created confusion, pastoral challenges, and conflicts between Catholic and non-Catholic healthcare institutions. For many of its supporters, the legal and moral legitimacy of PAS is grounded in the right to autonomy. I concur with Callahan that the right to autonomy, while it may be pertinent in moral debates on suicide, does not justify PAS. Unlike suicide, PAS is not a private matter. It involves the medical institution, represented by the physician who is given the authority to legitimize the termination of human life, and the society that grants it an imprimatur. If autonomy per se were the basis of this so-called dignity of PAS from the viewpoint of its proponents, they would not hesitate to declare suicide more dignified than any other way of dying. However, current laws in the U.S. regarding PAS are silent on legal rights to suicide or assisted suicide in general. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the legislature—not the court—is the appropriate venue for the legalization of PAS, since PAS involves social approval of assisted suicide. Therefore, the debate concerning the legalization of PAS should shift from individual rights to the common good, from autonomy to collective harms and benefits, and from justifying individual cases of PAS to legitimizing it as a social policy.

The thesis that there is a reciprocal relationship between human beings and work - i.e., although man controls work, he may find in it either fulfillment or degradation - has its roots in the Marxist theory of alienation. This paper therefore, tackles this problem from a Marxist perspective. It examines Marx and Engels's analysis of the history and causes of human alienation by presenting their views on human nature and how work is related to the individual's search for meaning and fulfillment. The two-man and work - cannot be separated, for doing so leads to alienated work (production alienation) and alienated worker (self-alienation). Hence, the problem of employee satisfaction has to be dealt with from the perspective of how employees experience their relation to their work.

There is a great deal of interest among business ethicists today in the topic of the spirituality of work. The connection between spirituality and business ethics has been acknowledged in scholarly literature, but this connection is expressed in different ways. Nonetheless, there is a growing consensus that spirituality and corporate profitability are not mutually exclusive. This essay presents a spirituality of work from the perspective of the Hindu religion. Hinduism is one of the major religions in the world, comprising 15% of the global population. In its origin, Hinduism is somewhat of a geographical term. It encompasses the various beliefs, spiritual practices, and rituals of people who originally inhabited the Indus Valley. Hinduism is not a single religion in the way the term “religion” is typically understood in the Western context. Treating it as one tradition without considering its diverse and pluralistic character, as well as the historical and textual factors that influence its development and complexities, is highly problematic. This study explores a Hindu spirituality of work using the "Bhagavadgita" as its primary source—one of the most important texts in Hinduism.

The term “Presocratics” refers to a group of Greek thinkers who lived not later than Socrates and who were not decisively influenced by him. They are often referred to as the first philosophers, as they represent the dawn of human speculation in the West. This essay examines the fragments of major Presocratics—Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras—which contain their views and arguments as reported by later authors. Although these fragments are incomplete and based on secondary quotations, it is possible to sift through them and develop coherent and logical interpretations that approximate the original ideas and intentions of these philosophers. The aim of this essay is to shed light on the philosophical meaning and significance of the concept of arche (ἀρχή)—an untranslatable Greek word that connotes origin, principle, first in a series, or source—which constitutes the central thread of speculation among the Presocratics and represents their most influential contribution to the history of Western thought.

A number of paradigms have been proposed to understand the sources of meaningful work, but a non-Western approach has attracted little attention. Because some authors have argued that meaningful work has a positive valence with eudaimonic rather than hedonic content, a virtue-ethics approach to meaningful work has been used. Virtue ethicists acknowledge that our work and places of employment have a profound influence in shaping our character and in living a fulfilled life. This study aims to make a theoretical contribution toward an understanding of meaningful work from a virtue-ethics framework that is culturally meaningful and ethically relevant to Filipino realities and their distinct national heritage. It develops a conceptual model for a Filipino view of meaningful work that could guide both researchers and practitioners in business ethics by explaining what makes work meaningful, justifying why this is important, and presenting some examples of concrete measures that management can utilize to promote meaningful work in the Philippine workplace. By integrating Filipino virtues in conceptualizing meaningful work, I believe a theoretical advancement is made toward a pluralistic and multicultural understanding of the concept, especially through the lens of virtue ethics.

The objective of this paper is to situate the ethics of Karol Wojtyła within the context of personalist philosophy—a 20th-century philosophical and theological movement that seeks to investigate reality from the point of view of the human person. Personalism places persons and personal relationships at the center of theory and practice, and explores the significance of personhood across disciplines and traditions. In terms of methodology, personalism takes into consideration both the data gathered by the empirical sciences and our lived experiences as members of a community. While not to be understood exclusively as a moral philosophy, most personalist philosophies place strong emphasis on ethical concerns. Personalist philosophers maintain that experience ought to be the starting point for the philosophical analysis of the person. At the outset, it must be clarified that this paper is not a systematization of the ethics of Wojtyła per se, for there is no such thing as Wojtyła's ethics that can be set apart from other ethical systems in general, or from Christian ethics in particular. Wojtyła did not develop his own “original” ethical system or philosophy. As many critics have pointed out, Wojtyła’s philosophical project is best described as incomplete. His work presents a picture of Aristotelian-Thomism enriched by a phenomenological analysis of the human person. He develops a phenomenology of the subject grounded in a personalist principle.

Meaningful work (MW) is defined as the degree of significance that employees believe their work possesses. Although it is an established area of scholarship, researchers who have studied this topic still encounter a number of difficulties. To begin with, there is little consensus on what exactly makes work meaningful. From a philosophical standpoint, the search for meaning is an essential part of being human. Thus, MW, according to Lips-Wiersma and Morris (2009, 657), "finds its roots in the humanities rather than in management theory." They also (2009, 508) express the need to consider differences in cultural and spiritual beliefs in studying MW. Most studies in this area are Western-centric, with very few attempts to consider non-Western and cross-cultural perspectives (Michaelson et al. 2014). The question of whether MW varies across cultures is rarely addressed. In this global economy, where major companies outsource their production to different countries and people of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds interact in the workplace, there is a growing need to compare and contrast how different cultures view MW. This study adds to the existing literature on MW by presenting a contemporary virtue-focused Buddhist view. While a virtue-ethics interpretation of Buddhism is now widely accepted and has been applied to several issues, not much has been written about MW using a Buddhist-Aristotelian comparative framework. To develop a Buddhist approach, I draw heavily on the works of Buddhist scholars, particularly in the West, who use a virtue framework in interpreting Buddhism. The aims of my essay are dual. The first is to articulate a straightforward application of Buddhism to the contemporary ethical discussion of MW. The second is to discuss the similarities, clarify the differences, and demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses—relative to each other—of the Buddhist and the Western virtue theories. In my analysis, I argue that while Buddhism is not an alternative to Western virtue theory, it offers significant contributions to the latter's approach to MW and even a corrective to some of its limitations. The integration of Buddhism in our theorizing of MW from a virtue-ethics perspective helps us to better understand ourselves and the virtues that we cultivate in the workplace, and develop a holistic and cross-cultural conceptualization that is relevant to our global economy.

The research is a comparative study of the atomic theories of Kanada and Democritus. Because of their pluralistic tendencies, emphasis on causality, materialistic account of sense knowledge, and attempt to explain the physical system by means of reduction to the configuration of its constitutive elements, both philosophers present an epistemological base that could accommodate scientific inquiry. Notwithstanding the early and expansive beginning of Indian atomism, modern scientific atomic theory traces its origin to Democritus. Through cross-cultural critical engagement with parallel ideas between Kanada and Democritus, the paper aims to discover the common problems they dealt with in order to further our understanding of the early history of atomic theory, to evaluate the relative merits and limitations of their proposed solutions, to resolve some difficulties that each account faces by appealing to the other, and to highlight their contributions to the emergence of the atomic worldview.

This paper is about the modern-day problem of human alienation and fulfillment in work from the perspective of the Catholic social thought. It analyses the symptoms and causes of work alienation, the meaning of work and its significance in the individual’s quest for fulfillment, and how the Catholic social teachings can shed light on the problems involved in transforming the world of work. Alienation in work affects one’s subjective and psychological fulfillment, but it is not ultimately dependent on material culture or economic models. The problem of alienation in work cannot be dealt with by simply modifying the production process or the wage system, although these are factors that alienate people even more. Social problems cannot be solved without light of faith and the recognition of the moral order that is rooted in God. In the final analysis, alienation is not simply the loss of meaning in human activities. It is the loss of life’s meaning and man’s estrangement from his own authentic nature, including his reason for being and final end, that results from the rejection of God and His teachings. What Catholicism provides is a combination of economic, psychological, moral, social, and spiritual motives for work that will make it personally fulfilling.

This paper aims to synthesize two equally impressive systems of thought: Indian philosophy in the East and Presocratic philosophy in the West, which are separated not only by space and time but by our prejudices. It attempts to show the universality of philosophy by exploring the parallelisms and similarities, clarifying contrasts, and highlighting the common themes that are emphasized and de-emphasized in them. The study does not intend to give a complete account of the early Greek and Hindu thoughts. The discussion of Hindu philosophy focuses on the Upanishads, the main source of Hinduism. We will use for our primary source the following texts which majority of Indologists consider as the most authoritative: Aiteriya, Kaushitaki, Taittiriya, Chandogya, Brihadharanyaka, Katha, Mandukya, Maitriyani, Svetasvatara, Isa, and Kena. On the side of Presocratic philosophy are included such major thinkers as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and Empidocles.

This essay is an interreligious study of spirituality of work. It considers the normative/doctrinal teachings on work in Bhagavadgita and Catholic Social Teaching. It will begin by exploring a Hindu spirituality of work based on Bhagavadgita. The paper will analyze salient ideas and relevant passages in the text that tackle the religio-spiritual significance of our daily engagement in the world through paid work from a Hindu perspective. A discussion on major themes in Catholic Social Teaching that resonate with Bhagavadgita’s tenets on spirituality of work will follow. These themes will serve as analytical elements that will frame an interreligious spirituality of work from the two points of view. This study will demonstrate that, as far as spirituality of work is concerned, there is more convergence than divergence between Catholicism and Hinduism. Spirituality of work can be a unifying force, a locus for cross-cultural dialogue, and a bridge between different beliefs in the workplace.

This study examines from an ethical framework the circumstances of workers who are engaged in non-professional services that are offered through corporations that are organized to serve high volume of costumers. Drawing on the relevant ethical teachings of the Catholic social tradition (CST), it explores some practices, strategies, and policies that could address the problems experienced by many service providers in the United States today. CST refers to a wide variety of documents of the magisterium of the Catholic Church which respond to the changing social and economic challenges of the modern world. The study argues that the primacy of the person, love and subsidiarity, sense of community, and respect for worker’s rights and unionism in CST are not only moral principles that uphold intrinsic human goods, they are likewise instrumental to operational effectivity because they promote job satisfaction, smooth interpersonal relationship, and long-term commitment with the company. They enable service providers to work efficiently, deliver exceptional service, and act as conduit between the customers and the business establishment, rather than simply being caught between their conflicting demands.

This essay is an interreligious study of the spirituality of work and its implications for business ethics. It considers the normative/doctrinal teachings on human work in the "Bhagavadgita" (BG) and Catholic Social Teaching (CST). Inasmuch as the focus of this study is the spirituality of work, it does not present an in-depth and comprehensive comparison of Hindu and Catholic religions. Similarities and differences between the texts under consideration will be examined, but such examination will be limited to the most critical and relevant points. It will begin by exploring a Hindu spirituality of work based on the BG. The paper will analyze salient ideas and relevant passages in the text that tackle the religio-spiritual significance of our daily engagement in the world through paid work from a Hindu perspective. A discussion on major themes in CST that resonate with the BG’s teachings on work will follow. These themes will serve as analytical elements that will frame an interreligious spirituality of work from the two points of view. The interreligious analysis will demonstrate that, as far as the BG and CST are concerned, the spirituality of work can be a unifying force, a locus for cross-cultural dialogue, and a bridge between different beliefs. Next, the essay will tackle the implications of a Hindu-Catholic spirituality of work for business ethics. It will explain how the two textual traditions deepen our understanding of work by providing answers to the questions: Why must we work? What is the right attitude to work? And how does our work connect us with other beings and with our ultimate end? Finally, the conclusion will demonstrate how the findings of this study relate to and enhance the outcomes of current research on the spirituality of work. Finding common ground in how different religions regard work would enable business professionals and managers to truly value diversity and inclusiveness, and to respond ethically to the expression of religions in an increasingly pluralistic workplace.

This study adds to the existing literature on meaningful work by offering a cross-cultural perspective. Since work shapes the kind of person that we are and plays an important role in our well-being, some theorists have adopted a virtue theory approach to meaningful work using an Aristotelian-MacIntyrean framework. For lack of a better term, I will call this a Western virtue theory. This paper presents a contemporary virtue-focused Buddhist perspective on the topic. While a virtue-ethics interpretation of Buddhism is now widely accepted and has been applied to several issues, not much has been written about meaningful work using a Buddhist-Aristotelian comparative framework. Buddhism is an important cultural component not only of countries that are predominantly Buddhist, but of other societies that have come into contact with it. To develop a Buddhist framework, I draw heavily from the works of Buddhist scholars, particularly in the West, who use a virtue framework in interpreting Buddhism. The aims of my essay are dual. The first is to articulate a straightforward application of Buddhism to the contemporary ethical discussion of meaningful work. The second is to discuss the similarities, clarify the differences, and demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses—relative to each other—of the Buddhist and the Western virtue theory perspectives. In my analysis, I argue that consideration of Buddhist perspective enables us to construct a cross-cultural, inclusive, and pluralistic conceptual model for the deliberation of meaningful work that complements the Western virtue theory.

The notion of the subjective dimension of work has its roots in Catholic Social Teaching. This essay offers a Buddhist perspective on this topic. Although there is no distinction between the subjective and objective dimensions of work in traditional Buddhist texts, Buddhist teaching on karma contains an implicit affirmation of the subjective dimension of work as the source of the morality of work, and this notion is a useful explanatory framework in understanding right livelihood in a contemporary setting. While Buddhist perspective on the subjectivity of work is consistent with the view of Catholic Social Teaching, consideration of Buddhism in our conceptualization of the subjective dimension of work will challenge us to revise and expand the concept and practice of meaningful work to integrate the well-being of workers, interpersonal relationships, meditative practice (mindfulness), and concern for the environment.

The thesis that there is a reciprocal relationship between human beings and work—i.e., although man controls work, he may find in it either fulfillment or degradation—has its roots in the Marxist theory of alienation. This paper, therefore, tackles this problem from a Marxist perspective. It examines Marx and Engels’s analysis of the history and causes of human alienation by presenting their views on human nature and how work is related to the individual’s search for meaning and fulfillment. The two—man and work—cannot be separated, for doing so leads to alienated work (production alienation) and alienated worker (self-alienation). Hence, the problem of employee satisfaction has to be dealt with from the perspective of how employees experience their relation to their work.

This paper tackles the current challenges to private sector unionism in the United States in light of Catholic social teaching (CST). The focus of the study is unionism in the private sector where the fall-off in membership is observed. CST is contained in a wide variety of official documents of the Catholic Church, in particular papal encyclicals, which present ethical norms for economic life in response to the changing realities of the modern world. The study begins with an analysis of the concrete situation: the causes of decline in union membership. It is followed by an ethical reflection on CST’s perspectives and exploration of practices, strategies, and policies that can help reverse the ongoing trend of union decline and revitalize the labor movement in the country. The paper argues that unions are good in themselves as an expression of the workers’ right to associate and instrumentally good as they invoke such values as the dignity of work, solidarity, subsidiarity, common good, and economic equality. While it has been proven that workers and society as a whole gain material benefits from effective unionization, focus on intangible benefits and moral principles offered by CST may give labor organizing a new impetus and inspiration.

This article presents an ethical analysis and critique of personalized service in the tradition of Catholic social teaching (CST) that is both Catholic and Personalist. It tackles the ethical issues involved when service delivery is personalized, issues that affect both the consumers and the service providers. It focuses on nonprofessional services that are offered by low-skilled blue-collar workers through corporations that are organized to produce efficient service to a high volume of consumers. Customer service involves intersubjectivity, that is, interaction between two persons as subjects. Ethics in the service context is not only about treating consumers in a just manner; the threats to the personhood of the service providers are also significant, for their work cannot be separated from their very being. By focusing on the ethical issues of emotional labor and consumerism of human service, the study will argue that the human interaction in personalized service runs the risk of alienating us from our authentic selves and from each other. If the objective of personalized service is to create authentic human relationship in the service encounter, the latter can arise even in a nonpersonalized service. We do not have to personalize our actions in order to create genuine human interaction. Instead, what we must do is to treat each other as persons.

The aim of this paper is to trace the root of socialistic thought in the Philippines after the Second World War. As such, the novels, poems, essays, and short stories of Amado V. Hernandez are examined. Hernandez is considered as one of the foremost socialist writers during the 1950’s to 1970’s—a poet, activist, leader of the labor movement, and a National Artist. In order to understand the emergence of socialistic thinking in the Philippines, the situation of the country from 1946-1970 is examined; this will determine whether socialism in the Philippines is, indeed, influenced by Mao and Lenin. Despite the poetic or literary style of Hernandez’s writings, it is still possible to reconstruct the socialist theme in his writings through a historico-philosophical approach

Meaningful work is both a moral issue and an economic one. Studies show that workers’ experience of meaninglessness in their jobs contributes to job dissatisfaction which has negative effects to business. If having a meaningful work is essential for the well-being of workers, providing them with one is an ethical requirement for business establishments. The essay aims to articulate an account of meaningful work in the Catholic social teachings. CST rejects the subjectivist and relativist notion of work which affirms the absolute freedom of individuals to choose their commitment and goals, even if this includes experiencing satisfaction in dehumanizing work. First, the paper will present a summary account of some of the current views on meaningful work from the objective-normative approach. This will be followed by a systematic treatment of the meaning and value of work in the CST, the similarities and differences it has with alternative views, and its implications for the way we promote meaningful work. The paper will argue that by recognizing the subjective and objective dimensions of work and affirming that although the two are inseparable, the former takes priority over the latter; CST develops a holistic, comprehensive, and coherent account of meaningful work which overcomes some of the difficulties that are usually encountered in dealing with this issue from a purely objective approach