As concerns about violence, war, terrorism, sexuality, and embodiment have garnered attention in philosophy, the concept of vulnerability has become a shared reference point in these discussions. As a fundamental part of the human condition, vulnerability has significant ethical import: how one responds to vulnerability matters, whom one conceives as vulnerable and which criteria are used to make such demarcations matters, how one deals with one’s own vulnerability matters, and how one understands the meaning of vulnerability matters. Yet, the meaning of vulnerability is commonly taken for granted and it is assumed that vulnerability is almost exclusively negative, equated with weakness, dependency, powerlessness, deficiency, and passivity. This reductively negative view leads to problematic implications, imperiling ethical responsiveness to vulnerability, and so prevents the concept from possessing the normative value many theorists wish it to have. When vulnerability is regarded as weakness and, concomitantly, invulnerability is prized, attentiveness to one’s own vulnerability and ethical response to vulnerable others remain out of reach goals. Thus, this book critiques the ideal of invulnerability, analyzes the problems that arise from a negative view of vulnerability, and articulates in its stead a non-dualistic concept of vulnerability that can remedy these problems.

Vulnerability is an important concern of moral philosophy, political philosophy and many discussions in applied ethics. Yet the concept itself—what it is and why it is morally salient—is under-theorized. Vulnerability, Autonomy, and Applied Ethics brings together theorists working on conceptualizing vulnerability as an action-guiding principle in these discussions, as well as bioethicists, medical ethicists and public policy theorists working on instances of vulnerability in specific contexts. This volume offers new and innovative work by Joel Anderson, Carla Bagnoli, Samia Hurst, Catriona Mackenzie and Christine Straehle, who together provide a discussion of the concept of vulnerability from the perspective of individual autonomy. The exchanges among authors will help show the heuristic value of vulnerability that is being developed in the context of liberal political theory and moral philosophy. The book also illustrates how applying the concept of vulnerability to some of the most pressing moral questions in applied ethics can assist us in making moral judgments. This highly innovative and interdisciplinary approach will help those grappling with questions of vulnerability in medical ethics—both theorists and practitioners—by providing principles along which to decide hard cases.

This volume breaks new ground by investigating the ethics of vulnerability. Drawing on various ethical traditions, the contributors explore the nature of vulnerability, the responsibilities owed to the vulnerable, and by whom.

Alongside globalization, the sense of vulnerability among people and populations has increased. We feel vulnerable to disease as new infections spread rapidly across the globe, while disasters and climate change make health increasingly precarious. Moreover, clinical trials of new drugs often exploit vulnerable populations in developing countries that otherwise have no access to healthcare and new genetic technologies make people with disabilities vulnerable to discrimination. Therefore the concept of ‘vulnerability’ has contributed new ideas to the debates about the ethical dimensions of medicine and healthcare. This book explains and elaborates the new concept of vulnerability in today’s bioethics. Firstly, Henk ten Have argues that vulnerability cannot be fully understood within the framework of individual autonomy that dominates mainstream bioethics today: it is often not the individual person who is vulnerable, rather that his or her vulnerability is created through the social and economic conditions in which he or she lives. Contending that the language of vulnerability offers perspectives beyond the traditional autonomy model, this book offers a new approach which will enable bioethics to evolve into a global enterprise. This groundbreaking book critically analyses the concept of vulnerability as a global phenomenon. It will appeal to scholars and students of ethics, bioethics, globalization, healthcare, medical science, medical research, culture, law, and politics.

""Two important aspects covered in this text are the ethical considerations in qualitative research methodologies, and the attention that is needed in University Research Ethics Committees to understanding and addressing these methodologies.""

This book portrays the kinds of relations through time and social space that people can create by working with their vulnerability as an affect that has power to yield new sensibilities, skills and values. It turns to the primary corporeal relations between mothers and their children in order to find the affective connections between generations.

As concerns about violence, war, terrorism, sexuality, and embodiment have garnered attention in philosophy, the concept of vulnerability has become a shared reference point in these discussions. As a fundamental part of the human condition, vulnerability has significant ethical import: how one responds to vulnerability matters, whom one conceives as vulnerable and which criteria are used to make such demarcations matters, how one deals with one’s own vulnerability matters, and how one understands the meaning of vulnerability matters. Yet, the meaning of vulnerability is commonly taken for granted and it is assumed that vulnerability is almost exclusively negative, equated with weakness, dependency, powerlessness, deficiency, and passivity. This reductively negative view leads to problematic implications, imperiling ethical responsiveness to vulnerability, and so prevents the concept from possessing the normative value many theorists wish it to have. When vulnerability is regarded as weakness and, concomitantly, invulnerability is prized, attentiveness to one’s own vulnerability and ethical response to vulnerable others remain out of reach goals. Thus, this book critiques the ideal of invulnerability, analyzes the problems that arise from a negative view of vulnerability, and articulates in its stead a non-dualistic concept of vulnerability that can remedy these problems.