The Rule on Thoughtless Extravagance Revisited
I wrote in this column a topic about the rule on thoughtless extravagance with no inkling that it will become a sensitive issue nowadays. A senator’s wife recently got into trouble for posting a picture of her expensive collection of bikes in social media. A vocal personality in showbiz chastised her for being insensitive to the plight of so many Filipinos who lost their jobs and sources of income due to the pandemic.
Indeed, a highest form of insensitivity is manifested by people who show off a life of luxury while the rest of the community suffer during a period of calamity, acute public want, or emergency. According to one authority, “One need not stretch his imagination to witness today a continuing carnival of pomp and vanity. The love for display of luxuries coupled with the glare for vainglories and frivolities carries with it the corruption of society and the debasement of public moral and decency.”
Cognizant of the plight of the many as against the insensitive extravagance of the wealthy few, Article 25 of the Civil Code provides that “thoughtless extravagance in expenses for pleasure or display during a period of acute public want or emergency may be stopped by order of the courts at the instance of any government or private charitable institution.”
Thoughtless and wasteful extravagances not only pollute the general public but emasculate and feminize the strong fibers of civilization and render stunted the goods of the righteous. A continued and prolonged obsession in unreasonable and unpardonable excesses will in the last computation or analysis bring about not only moral degeneration but also material disintegration equally harmful and destructive to both who indulge in them and those who are under or near such bad and evil influences. One of the main causes of unrest among the poor or among the masses, now in the past, is the all too often and frequent ostentation of vanity and riches in open disregard of the privation and poverty of the great majority. All this exhibition of pomp and thoughtless waste of money and fortune redound to retard the rapid material and economic advancement of society and gives the youth a deleterious and debasing example and affords the old no reason for justification or jubilation wheresoever and whensoever done. Hence the necessity of this new rule of law which aims to curb, if not altogether, this worldly vanity of vanities.
A good example is a marriage celebrated with lavishness after a typhoon which rendered practically everybody homeless in a community. Such act may be prevented where there are people who have practically no food to eat; such act may be prevented by an order of a court at the instance of a government or private charitable institution.
However, not anyone can ask the courts to prevent such thoughtless extravagance. It must be a government or private charitable institution that should ask for an order.(Lifted from Torts and Damages, 2016 Edition by Judge Ed Vincent S. Albano, citing Garcia & Alba)