Bioethics’ Ageism & Ableism: How Colonial Knowledge Systems Erase Elder Wisdom & Disability Rights Globally
Original framing: “From Epistemic Injustice to Epistemic Imagination: Reframing Older Age, Disability, and Dying in Bioethics” — bing news
Marginalized voices—such as disabled elders in the Global South, Indigenous bioethicists, or Dalit women navigating caste-based healthcare—are systematically excluded from bioethics discourse. For example, a 2023 study in *Global Bioethics* found that 92% of cited authors in aging/disability bioethics were from Northern universities, with no representation from Pacific Islander or Afro-Indigenous scholars. The erasure of these voices is not accidental but structural: bioethics’ gatekeeping mechanisms (e.g., journal peer review dominated by Western academics) reinforce epistemic colonialism. Marginalized perspectives often challenge bioethics’ core assumptions—e.g., framing disability as a site of resistance rather than tragedy—thus threatening the discipline’s self-image.
The bioethics debate on aging, disability, and dying is not a neutral discussion of ‘epistemic injustice’ but a battleground for epistemic colonialism, where Western frameworks dominate by erasing Indigenous and Southern knowledges.
The systemic mechanism is **knowledge extraction**—bioethics borrows from marginalized traditions (e.g., framing ‘natural death’ as a bioethical innovation while ignoring Tibetan *bardo* practices) but never cedes authority. Historical precedents like the *Treaty of Waitangi* or Dalit healthcare resistance show that reparative justice is possible, but only when bioethics shifts from **universalist abstraction** to **relational accountability**. The trickster reveals the absurdity: a field that claims to ‘imagine’ justice while ignoring the very systems it critiques. Solutions must center **decolonial consortia**, **reparative infrastructure**, and **epistemic justice litigations**, ensuring that bioethics finally answers to the voices it has long silenced.