Dr. Ruby S. Suazo, a Full Professor of the University of San Carlos (USC) Department of Philosophy and Assistant Dean of the USC School of Arts and Sciences, introduced the Filipino concepts of kapwa (shared humanity), loob (interior self), and damayan (empathetic solidarity) to the global stage. 

Last month, Dr. Suazo presented his research paper, titled “Kapwa, Loob, and Damayan: Filipino Indigenous Values as Theoretical Challenge and Practical Resource for Social Change,” at the Second Annual Conference of the Institute of Global Value Inquiry (IGVI) held in Wa, Upper West Region, Ghana.

The conference was organized through the joint support of the USC and IGVI, under the theme  “Indigenous Values and Social Change.”

As a vital conversation on heritage and social transformation, the conference gathered scholars from across the Global South to confront a dual challenge: examining how indigenous epistemologies and traditions endure under the relentless pressures of globalization, and exploring how these same values can actively drive social transformation rather than merely survive it. 

An argument in three levels 

Dr. Suazo’s paper recovers three Filipino relational values and argues that each operates in three distinct levels:

• First, kapwa (shared humanity) advances an ontological claim that the self is fundamentally constituted through its relation to others, rather than existing before that relation. 
• Second, loob (interior self) locates moral worth in the quality of one’s inner disposition and its outward consistency. 
• Finally, damayan (empathetic solidarity) names the obligation to enter into another’s condition and to act from within it. 

Together, these values pose a direct theoretical challenge to the individualistic, binary assumptions that structure dominant liberal moral and political frameworks. Beyond theory, they serve as a practical resource, offering vital criteria for leadership formation and institutional reform across political, economic, and socio-cultural domains. 

Furthermore, the paper builds its argument by diagnosing a historic fracture in Philippine life. Dr. Suazo highlights a condition of internal incongruence from the sociopolitical insights of Mina M. Ramirez and F. Landa Jocano: Filipinos are morally formed within one value system while being forced to navigate a public sphere built on another. He argues that the damage cannot be repaired by the very frameworks that caused it, treating this friction as a form of epistemic harm.

For Dr. Suazo, weaving together Johann Gottfried Herder’s concept of “situated universality” with Paul Ricoeur’s tension between the hermeneutics of suspicion and appropriation repositions Filipino relational values not as exotic anomalies, but as alternative, valid expressions of a universal human experience. 

Redefining the “Indigenous” 

Dr. Suazo carefully delineates what “indigenous” means in this context, aligning his definition with the scholarship of Jocano, Ramirez, and Zeus Salazar’s pantayong pananaw—a term signifying the precolonial, Malayo-Polynesian relational substratum that persisted beneath, rather than being displaced by the Hispanic-Catholic colonial order among the lowland, Christianized majority. 

This stands in stark contrast to the legal and anthropological definitions codified in the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA) of 1997. The law reserves the term “Indigenous Peoples” for upland and non-Christianized communities, such as the lumad and the Cordillerans, who historically preserved their autonomy by resisting colonial and religious assimilation.

Dr. Suazo states plainly that kapwa, loob, and damayan are indigenous in the cultural and evolutionary sense rather than the legal one. 

Therefore, explicitly naming this distinction in the paper is a non-negotiable condition for speaking honestly about indigeneity in the Philippines. 

The Philosophical Vocation 

Dr. Suazo returns to a core conviction about the discipline itself, where he believed that the true vocation of philosophy is not merely to echo Western canons: “To take the deepest available materials of one’s own lived world and patiently, originally, shape them into their very first philosophical expression.”