The importance of ethics in public policy analysis

Understood as decisions made from a position of power, which seek the greatest advantage possible for the public space, and which start from a deliberate selection of themes and alternatives for action, public policies are always and inevitably linked to an ethical posture. This posture can be explicit or not; it can be inscribed in the analysis model chosen, in the type of rationality attributed to actors implicated in it, or it can be transferred to the study of the restrictions, that the course of action suggested will facie, but in any case it will be inevitable. The purpose of this text is to offer arguments to underline the importance of incorporating the study of ethics into the analysis of public policies in a systematic and deliberate manner, within its. epistemological corpus, so as to avoid the latent risks (many times verified) that this absence can generate both in the design and in the implementation of the courses of action chosen by the State. These risks refere, among others, to the use of public power to favor private interests; to the negative externalities (in the language of Economics), that are produced when studying a single problem in. the public agenda, without any, reference to the public space in its whole; or to the blunder in a design selected because of a determined affirmation of values, which does not correspond with the possibilities of success for the public policy. This article is not looking at acts of corruption proper (that is, the various ways that the private and illegitimate appropriation of the public space deliberately adopts), because the objective of. this work is not to suggest a specific ethics opposed to the behaviors contrary to it, but rather to argue that the study of ethics is, in itself, important for the success or failure of public policies, even when all actors involved in a decision of State act in a morally impeccable manner. The point is that even under these ideal conditions, the absence of explicit references to ethics can produce deviations and irreparable failures in the selection of problems and in the courses of action chosen. And although the incorporation of ethics is no infallible guarantee for those mistakes not to be produced anyway, it can be in order to mitigate the effects of an ill use of public resources and to impede the action of the State. to be fragmented, without horizon or compass, in public policies that justify themselves without any ethical reference.