Implicações morais das decisões do Poder Público

Abstract

The attributions of a Modern State determine that the lives of its citizens are kept safe not only from external and internal attacks, but also by the infrastructure and services it provides, such as public health, sanitation, transport, and others. On the other hand, the Public Power is also responsible for a series of services which don´t imply lives being saved or lost, such as education, culture, leisure, sports, etc. Consequently, in an environment of scarce resources, every public decision is a trade-off between both policies. If life had absolute and undeniable value, as long as there were preventable deaths, the State could not spend any resources elsewhere. As it operates this way, there is, implicitly, a valuation of human life compared to other goods, which leads to a discussion about what is the level of requisition from citizens for the desired assets, what is the State's duty to provide them, and what priority ranking should be done. In addition, citizens who may have their lives affected by State decisions may sometimes not be identifiable, or not even born, and their death is a mere statistical aggregation of risk. These problems flow into a broad and ancient philosophical discussion about “letting die”, and the responsibilities of avoiding these fatalities. However, almost all of those debates falls upon individuals as agents, and not on organizations, which elicited an important question: the way that a situation presents itself to individuals is usually alien to their choices, while the current state of affairs in a the Public Power's decision is usually a result of other choices and policies previously made and with relatively predictable results, based on the massive amount of data available. As a result, for several authors, the State would be a different type of moral agent, which could not evade responsibility for statistically predictable acts. From the idea that the State does not adequately deal with the loss of life of its citizens, we seek to understand causes and solutions. In a nutshell, the human brain evolved to deal with problems common to small clusters, being evolutionarily inadequate both to think morally as a complex organization and to make decisions that affect millions of people, spatially and temporally distant. Consequently, we tend to put little value on lives being lost. But is there a solution to this problem? We suggest that cost-benefit analyzes are a good candidate for mitigating these problems, as they tend to make us think more analytically and impartially. However, to be effective, they need to be implemented, and therefore establishing a common denominator in society for the most drastic cases of injustice seems to be a good start.