Bioethical implications in the environmental licensing of large enterprises in Brazil

Abstract

Brazilian oil refineries’ environmental licensing process have been criticised for lack of healthcare aspects. Therefore, this paper aims to identify elements of bioethics that contribute to healthcare in this process. Based on an integrative review of scientific literature and on the deconstructive method proposed by Derrida, the relevance and legitimacy of bioethics to justify the relationship between morality and the consequences for individual’s, populations’s and ecosystems’s health is justified. We conclude that bioethics may contribute as a theoretical and practical tool to solve conflicts by describing existing struggles and moral dilemmas, through processes of criticism and justification and the establishment of morally acceptable measures for the protection of humans and environmental health.