MARGINALIA: The Ship That Keeps Moving

MAKATI CITY (MindaNews / 16 December) – Every few years, someone declares—often with alarm—that “wala na ang values ng kabataan.”

As if morality were a wooden ship docked somewhere in the past, now stripped plank by plank by modernity, social media, and too much Wi-Fi. Not to mention Chat-GPT.

I hear this cry in classrooms and from pulpits, at family reunions and—loudest of all—on Facebook. And when I hear that, it makes me think of an old philosophical puzzle: the Ship of Theseus.

The question is simple enough. If a ship’s parts are replaced gradually, one plank today, another mast tomorrow, until none of the original remains, is there something new that can still be called the same ship?

The Greeks found this troubling.

We mortals in the Philippines seem to find it troubling, too.

When we say the youth are “no longer the same,” what we really mean is this: Their language has changed. Their heroes are different. Their struggles are unfamiliar.

And so, we ask—sometimes anxiously, sometimes angrily: Are they still us? This is Ship-of-Theseus thinking applied to moral education. We assume: there is a fixed moral core, values are like detachable parts, and change, if unchecked, means loss.

That is why moral education often becomes defensive—more about protecting values than forming persons. We teach as if morality were a museum artifact: Do not touch. Do not revise. Do not question.

But lived morality has never worked that way. Not in history. Not in faith. Not in real Filipino lives.

I’d like to make a brief detour—far from Athens, and indeed Manila—to 17th-century Iran. And there, a philosopher by the name of Mullā Ṣadrā suggested something rather radical: Substance is itself in motion.

Not just colors, not just habits, not just external behavior—but being itself is always becoming. He called it ḥarakat-e jawhariyya: substantial motion. In simple terms: Things do not remain the same despite change. They remain themselves through change.

From this angle, the Ship of Theseus is no paradox at all. The ship is one continuous journey of becoming. Its identity lies not in frozen parts, but in directed movement. And then, almost quietly, the moral panic begins to fade.

Seen in this light, moral education in the Philippines is not about making sure that students are the same as their grandparents.

It is about guiding who they are becoming.

Our own languages say this clearly: pagpapakatao—becoming fully human; paghubog ng pagkatao—shaping character; paglilinang—cultivation, not storage. Even in Islamic moral education, the soul is never static. The nafs moves—from impulse (nafs al-ammārah), to conscience (nafs al-lawwāmah), to serenity (nafs al-muṭma’innah). In Catholic formation, conversion (metanoia) is lifelong. In indigenous wisdom, a person matures through experience, not insulation.

Why, then, do we teach morals as if growth were betrayal?

It is perhaps no coincidence that this anxiety is now finding expression in policy. Under the reform proposals associated with the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EdCom II), there is a move to realign the general education curriculum by removing Ethics as a stand-alone subject at the tertiary level and relocating it to Senior High School, on the assumption that ethical formation can be sufficiently addressed earlier and thereafter “mainstreamed” across college disciplines.

The proposal, at first blush, sounds practical, maybe even efficient. If, as its champions contend, ethics has been taught in K-12—and if considerations of the “moral lifeworld” are purportedly woven through everything—why should we make room for any of it at college anymore (now or ever) as a separate space of inquiry?

But read through the lens of the Ship of Theseus, the recommendation quietly reveals its own paradox. In treating ethics as a detachable plank—something that can be shifted downward, redistributed, or absorbed without loss—it assumes that moral formation will somehow remain intact even when its most reflective stage is removed from the very level where students begin to exercise professional, civic, and political agency.

This is where diffusion is mistaken for formation. Ethics in Senior High School introduces values; ethics in college interrogates them. Without a dedicated space for sustained moral reflection at the tertiary level, students are trained to master techniques faster than they are taught to ask why those techniques should be used—or for whom. Ethical questions then survive only as footnotes, if at all, to technical competence.

Ironically, this curricular move seems driven by the same unease it seeks to resolve. It presumes that moral reasoning either matures on its own or has already been completed by the time students enter higher education. But becoming ethical is not automatic, nor is it finished at eighteen.

Motion without direction is not formation; it is drift.

If moral education is truly about guiding who students are becoming, then removing structured ethical inquiry precisely at the stage when young adults confront power, profession, and public responsibility is not a neutral act of streamlining. It is a choice—one with moral consequences of its own.

The student who questions authority is not morally lost. The young voter who refuses old political loyalties is not value-less. The child negotiating faith in a digital world is not abandoning morality. They are in motion. The real question is not: “Are they still the same?” But: Toward what are we helping them move?

That is the educator’s task—not to freeze identity, but to give direction.

Perhaps this anxiety cuts deeper because the Philippines itself is a Ship of Theseus. Colonial names replaced. Constitutions rewritten. Regions reimagined. Identities pluralized. Mindanao knows this better than most. We’re constantly assured that change endangers our identity. But history does not bear this out: Identity lives on when it is oriented, not when it is frozen.

As Mullā Ṣadrā would say—though he never set foot here—continuity is not the absence of change. It is change with meaning.

So, what should moral education do?

Not shout “Bumalik kayo sa dati!” But ask, patiently and courageously: What kind of persons are we forming? What moral horizon are we pointing to? Are we accompanying growth, or merely guarding memories?

The ship is moving—whether we like it or not. The task is not to stop it. The task is to teach it how to sail.

And perhaps that is the most Filipino moral lesson of all.

#MoralEducationPH #Pagpapakatao #ValuesEducationPH #ShipofTheseus #MullaSadra#IslamicPhilosophy #PhilosophyofEducation

[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mansoor L. Limba, PhD in International Relations and Shari‘ah Counselor-at-Law (SCL), is a publisher-writer, university professor, vlogger, chess trainer, and translator (from Persian into English and Filipino) with tens of written and translation works to his credit on such subjects as international politics, history, political philosophy, intra-faith and interfaith relations, cultural heritage, Islamic finance, jurisprudence (fiqh), theology (‘ilm al-kalam), Qur’anic sciences and exegesis (tafsir), hadith, ethics, and mysticism. He can be reached at mlimba@diplomats.com and http://www.youtube.com/@WayfaringWithMansoor, and his books can be purchased]