MBG: When children are reduced to numbers, dehumanization follows

The recent debate over the alleged poisoning of children in the flagship Free Nutritious Meals (MBG) program touches the core of our development politics: How the state perceives its citizens.

In many official statements, the incident was described as “only a small fraction of the total beneficiaries.” This seemingly harmless technocratic phrase carries a profound moral hazard. It marks a shift in perspective, from viewing citizens as subjects of policy to reducing them into mere statistics in performance reports.

At that moment, public policy loses its moral soul.

We are witnessing the rise of statistical utilitarianism: The idea that the suffering of a minority is tolerable for the success of the majority. Jeremy Bentham might find such logic acceptable, since in Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) he argued that the best policy is one that produces “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”

But John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant would have disagreed. Mill, in Utilitarianism (1863), warned that collective happiness without moral grounding breeds new injustices. Kant, meanwhile, insisted that human beings must never be treated merely as means to an end. When thousands of sick children are dismissed as a “small number”, we are not just misrepresenting data, we are negating the very value of life itself.