The Social Ethics Society (SES) is a philosophical and academic organization that emerged from Mindanao, particularly Davao City, and has become an important intellectual network for philosophy, ethics, and social thought in the southern Philippines. Fr. Dexter Veloso is the current president of the organization. It has a total nationwide membership of 130. Dr. Christopher Ryan Maboloc acts as Chair of its Board of Directors.
Origins and identity
The SES was founded in 2010 in Davao City by the late Dr. Romulo Bautista and Dr. Christopher Ryan Maboloc. It grew out of the need for a philosophical community in Mindanao at a time when the island did not yet have its own major philosophical association. Its early membership consisted largely of philosophy teachers, researchers, and graduate students from Mindanao.
Its intellectual character was shaped partly by the complementary interests of its founders: Bautista's engagement with Marxist philosophy and Maboloc's work in applied ethics, political philosophy, and Rawlsian theory. This helped give SES a distinctive orientation toward philosophy as both rigorous intellectual inquiry and a means of responding to concrete social problems.
What makes SES distinctive
SES is not simply a professional association that organizes conferences. Its central orientation is the connection between philosophy and social reality. It seeks to:
- develop philosophical research in Mindanao;
- provide opportunities for young scholars and teachers to present research;
- promote ethics, social justice, human dignity, and equality;
- encourage dialogue between Mindanao scholars and international philosophers;
- produce scholarship addressing poverty, democracy, peace, governance, technology, education, and other contemporary issues.
This gives the organization a particularly socially engaged and interdisciplinary character.
Conferences and intellectual community
One of SES's most important contributions has been its annual conference. By 2026, it had reached its 16th Social Ethics Conference, bringing together educators, philosophers, researchers, and students for sustained discussion of ethics and social transformation. It has brought international scholars to Mindanao, a list that includes Dr. Darryl Macer, Dr. Daniel Mishori, Dr. Wataru Kusaka, Dr. Nima Rezaei, and Dr. Juichiro Tanabe. Dr. Rogelio Bayod has been instrumental in making the program possible.
The organization has also developed international connections. Its journal's advisory board includes scholars from institutions such as Waseda University, Linköping University, University of Birmingham, Nagoya University, Chulalongkorn University, and the University of Ibadan. It has collaborated with the Center for International Education of Waseda University in hosting the SES-PUP International Ethics Conference, an event that it co-organizes with the Polytechnic University of the Philippines in Manila.
The SES Journal
A major institutional achievement is the Social Ethics Society Journal of Applied Philosophy, which provides an academic platform for research in philosophy, applied ethics, governance, development, and related fields. Its current editorial structure includes scholars working in general philosophy and applied ethics, as well as development theory and governance. Dr. Ian Parcon is the current editor of the SES Journal. Mr. Migs Mansueto is the managing editor who oversees its daily activities.
SES and Mindanao philosophy
Perhaps its most significant historical contribution is that SES helped establish Mindanao as a site of philosophical production, rather than merely a place where philosophy is taught. Its work has created a community in which questions arising from Mindanao—the Bangsamoro problem, conflict and peace, indigenous knowledge, poverty, democracy, governance, inequality, and cultural identity—can become legitimate subjects of philosophical theorizing.
In this sense, SES represents a movement from philosophy about Mindanao to philosophy from Mindanao. The Social Ethics Society as one of the most significant institutional expressions of the emerging philosophical tradition of Mindanao: it combines professional philosophical scholarship with social engagement and provides an intellectual home for a generation of philosophers working at the intersection of ethics, politics, development, peace, and Mindanao's distinctive historical and cultural experience.