Editorial

Abstract

If you are reading this editorial it is because the world did not end in 2012, as widely trumpeted by the media throughout the year. Despite pessimistic predictions, we believe, effectively, that the opposite has occurred, at least in Brazil. We consider that the country entered a new era with regard to ethics in public life. The trial of Criminal Case 470 at the Federal Supreme Court (STF) made universal the concept of justice, applying to the powerful, in an unprecedented manner in the country, the legal rigor that so far only reached the average citizen. By universalizing justice, making it not only the formal law, but – in fact – an instrument of social citizenship, the Brazilian public life can begin to be healed, emancipating itself from the colonial morality that for hundreds of years overwhelms the public interest to the dictates of institutional power. One may say, then, that this trial allowed Brazilians to perceive, more than two centuries later, the Kantian proposal to applied moral philosophy: Act in such a way that the maximum of your action may become the principle of a universal legislation.