Abstract:
The phenomenon of the War on Drugs, which aims to purposefully eradicate the
activities involving illegal drugs, orchestrated by the administration of President Rodrigo
Duterte since June of 2016 had produced various opinions from the public. In this light,
the study explored the political preferences of selected Filipinos towards the policies of
the campaign through their moral motivations or the ability to morally decide on the
rightness and wrongness of an event, decision, or process. Grounded theoretical approach
of the qualitative paradigm was utilized to examine the verbal responses of twenty-two
(N=22) selected individuals from Metro Manila, the region with the highest illegal drug-related
cases. A series of coding and thematic analyses revealed that internal influences
such as affection, religious beliefs, intentionalities, predicted behavioral response and
prior knowledge about War on Drugs have an existing inter-dynamic relationship with the
external influences of moral motivation such as physical environment and socioeconomic
status. The formulated theory shows how these factors are morally deliberated to
determine a political preference such as being pro-War on Drugs, anti-War on Drugs, or
pro-War on Drugs with reservations. It is recommended, hence, that a wider scope
consisting of other influences such as attitude be studied consisting of more controllable
and quantifiable variables for future research.
