Erosion of moral agency: Democratic judgment, state violence, and the Philippine drug war

Research on democratic violence has examined human rights violations, dehumanization, moral disengagement, and public complicity, but less attention has been given to how democratic conditions of judgment themselves deteriorate, enabling coercive violence to become publicly acceptable. This article addresses this gap by conceptualizing erosion of moral agency as a distinct democratic wrong: a patterned weakening of the shared conditions through which citizens recognize, evaluate, and contest state violence. Using Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippine war on drugs as a theory-building case, the article examines how coercive violence can become normalized without the complete collapse of formal democratic institutions. Drawing on empirical scholarship, human rights reports, public opinion research, and analyses of punitive narcotic governance, the article identifies three interconnected mechanisms: enemy construction, bureaucratic routinization, and unequal grievability. These mechanisms shape whose suffering becomes publicly visible, whose deaths are treated as legitimate or unavoidable, and whether demands for restraint and accountability retain political force. The article contributes a distinct conceptual account by locating the democratic injury not primarily in individual attitudes or victim representations but in the deterioration of shared conditions of moral and political judgment. It further connects this account to human rights, harm reduction, atrocity law, and democratic accountability.