ood evening class,” I wasn’t late this time, in fact I was a good 10 minutes early.
“God evening, sir,” my Omega Class of junior law students answered sheepishly. This daily pattern of non-stop rain in the afternoon is really dampening people’s moods. It’s sullen enough to make a belly-dancing class unengaging, you can imagine what the mood can do to a law lecture.
“At the heart of the study of law is philosophy,” I began my planned take on the constitutional right to free information, “because you must always remember, class, that the ultimate aim of all law is to attain justice, of right prevailing over wrong. For that to happen, good must prevail over evil and as you will all admit that doesn’t happen very much these days.”
“To distinguish good from bad, in order to pursue justice, you need values, and values is informed by truth, truth is defined by facts, facts are alleged by people, people make up society and finally society functions under its constitution.”
“So there you have it, your intro,” I leaned back. “for society to function, it must have a solid foundation in philosophy—which is the search for the ultimate truth. Now, some of you come from social science backgrounds in the undergrad. For the rest of you, philosophy might as well be college calculus—boring and irrelevant.”
“Unfortunately, as law students, you cannot escape it. Now, granted, here in this college, we don’t have Legal Philosophy. But in other schools, it is one of the compulsory subjects. If you want to cross-enrol only THAT particular subject one summer, maybe, I will not discourage you. But we can have a little taste of it as we discuss the implications of the constitutional right to free information.”
One hand shot up in the front row from a familiar student.
“Yes, Miss Ursula Bahag-hari.”
“Sir, I lost my copy of the list of cases you assigned for our reading—”
“Naah, it will turn up, don’t worry. Maybe it just went for a walk,” I said triggering snickers among her classmates. But apparently she has more of a point to make.
“So I looked up your Facebook page because you promised to leave a link on your wall,” Miss Ursula continued, “and I saw one of your articles .... You don’t believe in fact-checking, sir?”
That was the ultimate curve ball. I wasn’t expecting THAT question.
“I don’t. What about it?”
“Well, if you’re going to teach us freedom of information, I for one would rather think you should be a man of steeled principles. In fact, I was sort of beginning to look up to you,” the girl spoke with a sharpened look on her face.
“Look up to ME? When did you start doing that?”
“After I spoke with some of your old students last semester, your Alpha Class? They gave me the impression you were some kind of guru, some kind of paragon of virtue or something like that,” she said.
“You talked to the WRONG students,” I scowled, “if you talked to the right ones, they would have told you that I taught them one thing foremost of all: I wanted them to learn how to think like a criminal. Now does that sound like words coming from a ‘paragon of virtue’ Miss Ursula?””
She totally ignored my retort. “Why don’t you believe in fact-checking, sir?”
This girl was serious!
“Have you tried taking a shower on a cold Baguio morning, Miss Ursula?”
“Yes, sir. I heated water on a kettle in my dorm and blended it with some tapwater to produce lukewarm. Please answer my question, sir.”
“Answer mine first. So wouldn’t you rather buy a hot water heater?”
“Yes, sir, I wouldn’t mind buying a hot water heater.””
“What for??” I asked rhetorically, “hot water doesn’t have to be heated. You must mean a COLD water heater---unless you’re really looking for a HOT water cooler?”’
She stared at me with a puzzled look, “Wha--I don’t get—WHAT is the point, sir?”
“My point, Miss Ursula, is you use the term ‘hot water heater’ even though you can clearly tell it is an inaccurate term. The same way you use ‘FACT-CHECKING’ even though you can clearly tell it’s a wrong term. If you lay out FACTS, why would I have to check anything?”
“Of course, you should check, sir. What if I’m telling a lie?”
“Well, then in that case, you want me to do LIE-CHECKING, not FACT-CHECKING,” her classmates erupt in murmurs, agreeing, disagreeing, or not knowing what to think.
“It’s all semantics, sir. So, okay, let’s say I wanted you to do LIE-CHECKING. Then you should do it. What’s wrong with LIE-CHECKING, sir?”
“The same thing that’s wrong with the blind leading the blind,” I said, “What gives me the moral ascendancy to check if you’re lying when I am a liar myself?”
“You are a liar, sir?” Miss Ursula’s eyes shot wide open.
“Of course I am,” I said, “so stop looking up to ME. Look for some other paragon of virtue. But you won’t find that so easy because everybody lies, some better than others. We all lie, except for different reasons. It’s called MOTIVE—maybe you’ve heard about it in Criminal Law…?”
“Yes, sir. Motive—it’s what controls our actions and our words and…”
“Uh-huh…keep going, you’re getting warm,” I said.
“But isn’t that such a cynical premise, sir? That everybody lies? Like you said, people have VALUES, so some of them wouldn’t tell a lie as readily. They have ETHICS, there’s such a thing as ETHICS! Some issues are either black or white. If we talk about truth and values, there can be no shades of blackness or whiteness in between."”
“Do you have ethics, Miss Ursula?”
“Yes, sir!” she answered adamantly.
“But you would lie, wouldn’t you?”
“Not by default and certainly not as a matter of principle, sir!” the girl said sanctimoniously.
“Would you tell a lie to save a friend’s life, Miss Ursula?”
“It depends, sir.”
“Depends on what??” I challenged.
“It depends on what I’m saving my friend’s life from!”
“Well, WHATEVER it is that you might save your friend’s life from, would you lie for that?” I pressed her on.
“No, sir!”
“Because you have ETHICS?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Why did you wear a yellow dress today, Miss Ursula? The last time you were wearing blue denim jeans in class. But today is yellow day. What happened to blue?”
“Maybe I didn’t like blue today. Maybe I wanted to wear a different color, is there anything so significant about THAT, sir?”
“MAYBE you didn’t like blue today? MAYBE? So there were really other color choices, you just said yellow because maybe that’s it? Couldn’t you have tried better to really make up your mind on your answer? Why lie about that, Miss Ursula?”
“Because IT DOESN’T MATTER, sir! It’s just about color. It’s ONLY about dress color.” Miss Ursula was getting flabbergasted, I could tell. Her classmates were getting curiouser and curiouser.
“Let me see here, Miss Ursula. You would lie about your color preference because it doesn’t matter. But you would NOT lie to save a friend’s life when it REALLY matters? I’ll say you have your ethics kind of upside down, don’t you think?”
She could not answer.
“Let me do something called ‘raising the stakes’ Miss Ursula. Would you lie to save YOUR MOTHER’S life?”
“Yes, sir. If my own mother’s life is in danger, I would lie. Anybody would. You would!” she countered.
“Of course,” I said, “but a while go, you would not lie to save a friend’s life. But you would lie to save your mother’s life. What if your friend was somebody’s mother? Why is one mother’s life worth more than another?”
“BEEECAUSSSSE…..” she faltered, “because the impact on me of the loss of my mother is greater than the impact on me of any other mother dying. It’s about degrees of impact on our personal lives, sir.”
“No, no, no—” I interrupted, “a while ago you said, where ethics are concerned issues are either black or white. There are no degrees of blackness or whiteness in between.”
This time the whole class fell silent. So I joined the awkward silence and let the mood sink in for a few moments before saying another word..
“You see, class, if I fact-check, or lie-check you, I’m not really correcting your mistake. I am conveniently omitting consideration of the fact that I can be as wrong as anyone because I can lie as easily and as readily as everyone. So what I’m really doing is superimposing my values on you. I’m saying what I believe to be true, whether I’m right or wrong, I want you to exchange with what you believe to be true, whether you are right or wrong. And that, class, is unconstitutional, whether you believe it or not.”
Miss Ursula wasn’t giving up.
“So, sir, you are for the proliferation of fake news, you would allow the people to be misled by trolls with dubious agenda.”
“Miss Ursula, if you do a fact-check right now and ask each and every one of your classmates, everyone will tell you that in the last hour or so, I did NOT say THAT.”
Then I looked around if I could find another student, maybe a more pragmatic one.
“Mr. Roberto Sigalot, stand up, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Please read Article XVI, Section 10 of your 1987 Constitution.”
“Here it is, sir, Section 10. The State shall provide the policy environment for the full development of Filipino capability and the emergence of communication structures suitable to the needs and aspirations of the nation and the balanced flow of information into, out of, and across the country, in accordance with a policy that respects the freedom of speech and of the press.”
“Thank you, Roberto you may sit down,” I began to wind up the topic, “now I know, class, that trolls are annoying the living lights out of you. But if you prayed for something, and you get what you were praying for, do not complain. You should have asked the Constitutional commission NOT to use the phrase ‘balanced flow’ but instead say a ‘controlled, morally-upright, responsible, tack-sharp accurate, statistically-based and thoroughly fact-checked flow’ of information. Then we would have to discard free information and an independent social media and gone for responsible state-controlled media environment. But that’s what we had during martial law and we did not particularly like that, either.”
“So fake news and legitimate news should thrive side by side, is that IT, sir?” Mr. Sigalot asked.
“Does that threaten you, Roberto? Are you afraid you may not be able to distinguish one from the other? Do you need Miss Ursula here to fact-check for you?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Class dismissed.”*
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