The Face of the Other on Extrajudicial Killings under Duterte through the Ethical notion of Emmanuel Levinas.

This paper explores the painful reality of extrajudicial killings during President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. It reflects on how countless lives, mostly poor and powerless, were silenced, erased, and stripped of their humanity by a system that encouraged violence and justified it with fear. Drawing from Levinas’ idea of the Face of the Other and our natural, infinite responsibility to one another, the paper asks: What happens when we no longer see the Other as human? When society stops listening, when power speaks louder than compassion, ethics begins to break down. The victims of the drug war were more than statistics or names on cardboard. They were sons, mothers, neighbors, people whose faces we failed to see. Levinas reminds us that responsibility does not begin with laws or systems, but in that fragile, sacred moment when we encounter another person and are called to care. By dehumanising the dead and confronting the silence that surrounded their deaths, this paper becomes both a philosophical reflection and a moral plea, to look again, to see the face, and to say, “I will not turn away.” In a time when violence became routine, this is a call to restore our humanity.