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Vulnerability is Said in Many Ways

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Vulnerabilities

Part of the book series: Integrated Science ((IS,volume 18))

Abstract

The pandemic has demonstrated, in an amplified way, that vulnerability is common to all human beings. Nevertheless, the paradigm shift proposed by the ethics and discourses built around vulnerability did not take hold. The call for a more just and less competitive society, which became widespread during the pandemic, did not immediately seem to be as urgent afterwards. In fact, since the pandemic, attitudes seem to reflect a desire to erase this experience and restore the status quo ante. Can this operational limit of the concept of vulnerability be a sufficient reason to abandon this interpretive paradigm and return to the old Promethean idea of man which shaped modern society? In the light of the pandemic, is it not worthwhile instead to question vulnerability more deeply? Is it not important to continue reflecting on the anthropological approach underlying vulnerability in order to understand how it can provide an ethical and political perspective for building a better future? Starting from these questions, this essay explores vulnerability from a philosophical perspective, analysing its strengths and weaknesses.

As the other of violence, vulnerability may itself

constitute or be constituted by violence

Eleine P. Miller, Bodies and the Power of Vulnerability, 2002

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Latin expression is formed by adding the prefix re to the verb salire ‘to leap, to bound, to bounce’, and thus means ‘to spring back, to rebound’. On the bound of resilience and vulnerability [1].

  2. 2.

    As Zhang states: “The word ‘suffering’ is a translation of the word duhkha (Pali) or dukkha (Sanskrit), which literally means dis-ease or unsatisfactoriness. There is a well-known Buddhist claim, “All this is dukkha.” Suffering is, then, shown as a kind of dis-ease caused by human finitude. However, suffering is more complicated than a subjective, psychological description or an intentionalist view that the phenomenal character of any experience is entirely constituted by its representational content; instead, it has a wide range of meaning from that experienced and reality itself, although Buddhism does not seem to focus on reality as it is without human experience” [46, p. 43].

  3. 3.

    This aspect is further developed in the light of the recent pandemic. In his most recent books, written during and after the pandemic, the philosopher tries to imagine a different kind of immunisation, which seems to lose its constrictive connotations and requires a new interpretation, both biological and political. He shows different immunising reactions which can take different account of vulnerabilities. For example, the model of herd immunity proposed at the beginning of the pandemic by the United Kingdom, Sweden, the United States and Brazil is based on tanatopolitical principles that envisage, if not the elimination, at least the marginalisation of the “less fit” in favour of the more productive segments of the population [see 47].

  4. 4.

    See: UNESCO’s “The Principle of Respect for Human Vulnerability and Personal Integrity,” Report of Keep the hyphen International Bioethics Committee of UNESCO (IBC), (2013); the University of South Carolina’s Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute “Social Vulnerability Index for the United States” (2013); the Council for International Organisations of Medical Sciences’ “International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects,” prepared in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, (2002); and going further back, the “Barcelona Declaration on Policy Proposals to the European Commission on Basic Ethical Principles in Bioethics and Biolaw”, adopted in November 1998, and the NIH’s “The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research” (1979).

  5. 5.

    Ibo van de Poel, Tristan de Wildt, and Dyami van Kooten Pássaro, in their study [48, p. 47] used the computational tool of topic modelling - which allows one to track the changing frequency of specific topics in a corpus of text. The results showed that while the values of safety and health increased significantly in the first months of the pandemic, the values of democracy, privacy and socio-economic equality decreased.

  6. 6.

    This may include what Fineman calls “the human being’s embodied vulnerability”, which varies according to the quality and quantity of resources we possess or can use in order to also be resilient to those elements that make us vulnerable [37, p. 21].

  7. 7.

    To quote Catherine Malabou’s expression, “Ontology of the Accident” [12].

  8. 8.

    “Crucially, notes Clough, this is not to say that this shared vulnerability is experienced in the same way. The importance of focusing on the particular experience is a vital aspect of vulnerability theory and recognises, perhaps more clearly than the social model, that it is the particular individual’s interaction with society which is significant. This raises further questions of how we can make law and policy responsive to particular individuals and how interventions or shifts in broader structures or institutions would impact on users of services” [49, p. 479].

  9. 9.

    It should be noted, however, that the view that the risks of the virus could affect anyone, regardless of their location, has been widely criticised as the pandemic is exacerbating existing health inequalities [14]. Furthermore, intersectional studies have shown that when the workforce is racialised and feminised, safety standards decline along with wages. [15]. Even if, as Sandra Laugier notes, the pandemic has “highlighted the vulnerability of everyone, including the privileged, who have found themselves lost without their many ‘services’ […] the better-off have the capacity to conceal or deny their acuteness by delegating care” [50, p. 52].

  10. 10.

    As one can read in another text of Furedi of 2003: “The model of human vulnerability and powerlessness transmitted through therapeutics coincides with a far wider tendency to dismiss the potential for people exercising control over their lives. The narrative of emotional vulnerability coexists with powerful ideas that call into question people’s capacity to assume a measure of control over their affairs. Social commentators regularly declare that we live in the era of the ‘death of the subject’, ‘the death of the author’ or the decline of agency. Such pessimistic accounts of the human potential inform both intellectual and cultural life in the west. The survivalist outlook alluded to by Lasch is not simply fueled by a preoccupation with the vulnerability of the self but also by the conviction that the world has become an intensely dangerous place beyond the control of humanity. Western society is continually haunted by the expectation of crisis and catastrophe. Environmental disasters, weapons of mass destruction, ‘technology gone mad’ are just some of the concerns that have helped to fashion a permanent sense of crisis” [51, p. 130]. See also [52, p. 57]. More recently, also [27]. This discourse was also at the centre of Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the proposed restrictions during the COVID 19 pandemic [see 53].

  11. 11.

    In her work on forms of life as a critique of capitalism, Rahel Jaeggi underlines the primacy given to critical activity per se, which in turn is focused on crises and problems, and thus the relaunching of a “negativist” approach with regard to all those philosophical and anthropological attitudes that instead aim at researching and identifying the hypothetical essential or fundamental nuclei of human existence or its (self-)realisation. [43]

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  1. University of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy

    Stefania Achella

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    Stefania Achella

  2. Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Chantal Marazia

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Achella, S. (2023). Vulnerability is Said in Many Ways. In: Achella, S., Marazia, C. (eds) Vulnerabilities. Integrated Science, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39378-5_1

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