The tragedy of Samarco and liberalism

Abstract

This article intends on discussing, from a liberal point of view, the (in)justice of the decision to not adopt safety measures in relation to the dam in the city of Mariana before the Samarco disaster. As such, we synthetically analyze the evolution of liberal thinking from the corollaries of the individual, reason and liberty and their respective contributions to modern constitutionalism: humanism, popular sovereignty, the separation of powers and human rights normativity. We concluded that the nuclei of liberal theory do not justify the public or private decisions that predicted the tragedy in Mariana because: 1) they violate the social contract of survival; 2) they are a rupture of the separation of powers, since they are illegal from a positivist perspective; 3) they subvert negative and first dimension universal human rights (safety, life, liberty and property); 4) they are incompatible with utilitarianism, since their consequences qualify as immeasurable; 5) they do not adjust to the Kantian categorical imperatives, as they cannot be considered universal laws; and 6) they do not adapt to the Theory of Justice, since they would not pass either the scrutiny of the veil of ignorance or the principle of difference.