The taxation of sin as behavioral governance: economic regressivity, fiscal invisibility, and biopolitical rationality in Brazilian selective taxation

Abstract

This article examines, from a dogmatic-legal perspective, "sin taxes," understood as selective taxes on products harmful to health, such as alcohol, tobacco, and ultra-processed foods, in light of the Selective Tax established by Constitutional Amendment No. 132/2023 and regulated, in its first stage, by Complementary Law No. 214/2025. The problem investigated is whether such taxes effectively protect public health or whether the sanitary rhetoric operates as a legitimization of regressive and politically invisible revenue-raising strategies. The central objective is to demonstrate that sin taxes, in the Brazilian context, go beyond the sanitary function and constitute mechanisms of behavioral governance. To this end, the constitutional foundations and limits of extra-fiscality are reconstructed, and, in the Brazilian case, the regressivity of consumption taxation is confronted with the underlying biopolitical rationality. Through bibliographic review, normative analysis, and examination of the jurisprudence of the Supreme Federal Court, this study supports the hypothesis that these taxes are structured around three integrated features: regressivity (economic and ethno-racial), fiscal invisibility, and biopolitical rationality. It concludes that sanitary rhetoric frequently masks a regressive revenue-raising purpose, proposing guidelines for normative reorientation based on subsidiarity, proportionality, and the restoration of progressivity.