For a not colonized life: dialogue between intervention bioethics and coloniality

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss some concepts - developed within the Coloniality Studies by a group of thinkers in Latin America - about how Modernity emerged structured as a way to dispose power, knowledge and being, so that a hierarchy between center and periphery, installed in a colonial perspective, organizes our way of dealing with politics, with science and - this is the main focus of this paper - with life. Intervention Bioethics (IB), whose proposal is to politicize in an ethical manner the method of dealing with biotechnoscientific, sanitary, social and environmental conflicts from the Latin American reality, develops a line of research that can accommodate the contributions, as well as the criticisms, from Coloniality Studies, particularly with regard to conceptual frameworks related to the ethical and epistemological theories that support it. Among these conceptual frameworks, this paper deals specifically with the relationship between the utilitarianism accepted by IB through a supportive consequentialism and its interrelations with the idea of Coloniality.