TOWARDS A VULNERABILITY-CENTRED PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS: PERSONHOOD, HUMANITY AND BODILY PRECARIOUSNESS OF THE MEDIATIZED, EXILED SUBJECT (original) (raw)

REFLECTIONS ON A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS: ITS FOUNDATIONS ON EMPATHY AND THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF VULNERABILITY

Bolletino Filosofico XXXVII, RIPENSANDO L’EMPATIA TRA ETICA ED ESTETICA, 2022

This paper reflects on the possibility of phenomenological ethics that grounds on the acknowledgment of our ontological/situational vulnerability, to which migrants and exiled people are particularly exposed. I argue that such an ethics, while being both universal and particular and guided by reason, has its foundation in affectivity. By taking recourse on both Husserl's late ethics and the ethical approaches of J. Butler, M.A. Fineman, A. MacIntyre, M.C. Nussbaum and B. Waldenfels. I'll argue that a proper recognition of our bodily vulnerability and the concomitant absolute value of self-preservation involves both a proper material axiology and the cultivation of emotions and virtues, such as love and solidarity, within a community bound by love, reason and the pursuit of happiness.

Human Sovereignty Eclipsed? Toward a Posthumanist Reading of the Traumatized Subject in

2021

The main aim of this article is to analyse J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) from a posthumanist perspective. By focusing on the character David Lurie, this article analyses the complex materiality of bodies and the agentic powers of nonhuman entities in coping with individual trauma, where agency is no longer considered to be the distinguishing quality unique to humans. In so doing, it highlights the interdependence of the human and the nonhuman and the idea that environment is not a mere canvas onto which characters' traumas are being reflected. On the contrary, it is a material-affective matrix which becomes a catalyst for making sense of the world in post-apartheid South Africa. At the same time, as this article argues, it decentres the sovereignty of the human subject.

Phenomenological Ethics

2015

Abstract: This paper is a presentation of Emmanuel Levinas ’ notion of corporeality that shows struggling dialectic from a phenomenology of a sensible subject towards an ethics of transcendence. With the author’s attempt to show that the Good is given and received through sensibility held by the body dwelling in the world, she proposes that the seeming conflict between the seeming corporeal pull to dwelling as against the Desire to take an ethical flight can be settled when one courageously confronts the following truths about humanity: that human beings are, 1) more than their thoughts, as 2) they are made of flesh and blood and that 3) they are in and thus influenced by the world. Through the work of corporeality, the subject is weakened by pain despite virility, suffers despite being at home and longs for a sublime unknown in the face of plenitude. By the stern conviction that existence can also be obscure and indefinite for consciousness to old, Levinas is able to explain how an...

REFLECTIONS ON THE VALUE OF VULNERABILITY: TOWARDS A RELATIONAL UNDERSTANDING OF VULNERABILITY WITH ETHICS OF CARE

International Journal Of Philosophy And Social-Psychological Sciences

Vulnerability is an inalienable aspect of human existence. In spite of the fact that sufficient groundwork has been done on the notion of vulnerability, it is to be noted that until now, vulnerability has typically been conceived as a negative condition relating to dependency, weakness, fragility, passivity and exploitation. Contrary to this, this paper attempts to re-consider the concept of vulnerability along positive lines by principally focusing upon the moral and ontological roots of vulnerability by employing the Feminist Ethics of Care model. The exponents of Care Ethics extend a normative version of vulnerability with prime emphasis on two aspects, namely, vulnerability as a compositional form of relationality and responsibility. The question that will be addressed in this paper is, ‘How can we construct a progressive and value-laden approach to vulnerability by employing the principles of an Ethic of Care?’ Fundamentally, it will be argued that between the individual and the universal, lies relationships that have been overlooked while discussing the notion of vulnerability. This study therefore, aims to unlock the moral dynamic of vulnerability with ontological implications. Subsequently, an idea of Shared human vulnerability will be authentically introduced in the paper which will help us to think about the power of vulnerability with the existential genesis of Care Ethics. Keywords: Ethic of Care; Feminist Ethics; Relational Ontology; Shared Human Vulnerability; Vulnerability; Vulnerable Subject.

The Faces of Human Vulnerability

Postmodern Openings, 2021

The philosophic notion of human vulnerability cannot be pinpointed as such in the corpus of classic philosophy. Nevertheless, death and suffering as essential philosophical and theological problems make reference to the dimension of vulnerability inherent to the human condition. Since times immemorial, the fear of death, the avoidance of suffering, or the crisis situations of human existence have laid at the basis of philosophical and religious systems. According to Freud, in the futile pursuit of happiness humans often face misery, which stems from a suffering that threatens them from three different directions: their own body, the outside world, and the relationships with other people. Starting from this angle, the present article furthers the notion of vulnerability by identifying its archetypal themes in relation to human life and its conditions of existence. Two main concepts will guide this study of human vulnerability: a vulnerability inherent to human subjectivity, and one c...

Vulnerability, justice and care

Oñati Socio-Legal Series, 2022

The concept of vulnerability is once again assuming a central role in ethical-political-legal discourse. This is the case both in relation to its neo-liberal reinterpretations, aimed at placing the responsibilities and consequences of vulnerability onto the vulnerable subject itself, and, on the contrary, to the theses - the result, to a large extent, of a reworking of the ethics of care – of authors such as Martha Fineman, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, Catriona Mackenzie and others, who use the idea of vulnerability as a basis for re-founding and reorganising liberal policies, freeing them from fictitious concepts such as the alleged basic autonomy of the human being. The article aims to analyse the different meanings and implications that, due to the accentuation of different aspects of vulnerability, add up to produce such a multifaceted concept, in order to try to clarify the conceptual implications and practical consequences that vulnerability may elicit.

« Vulnerability: A Concept with Which to Undo the World as It Is ? », introduction, special issue « The Politics of Vulnerability »

Critical Horizons, 2016

Vulnerability is a concept with fleeting contours as much as it is an idea with assured academic success; its topicality in Europe and the United States, however, refers to different histories. In the United States, what we see is the expression of a polyform reflection on torturable, "mutilatable" and killable bodies, especially after September 11 and the ensuing bellicosity. In this way, Judith Butler points to the irreducible dimensions of human sociality, violability and affectability, on which she founds an ethics of non-violence and imagines a new form of community. The centrality that she confers to the possibility of bodily destruction is such that she reflects the unequal distribution of vulnerability through a contrast between lives that are worth mourning and those that are not. From a wholly other perspective, one developed on the basis of ethnographic surveys on mass violence and collective rapes in India after the Partition, 1 Veena Das takes up the task of thinking through the way in which forms of life are also forms of violent death, in which a form of death is born in the matrix of everyday life. Reciprocally, she considers how the distribution of violence, torture and massacres can haunt and shape everyday relations.

Vulnerability Theory and Transhumanism: Helping The Ontologically Vulnerable.

Ithaque, 2024

This paper challenges the prevailing notion in vulnerability theory that only relational vulnerability holds moral significance for aiding the vulnerable. Contrary to this stance, I contend that ontological vulnerability carries moral relevance, and thus grounds a consequentialist duty to mitigate potential harm. This duty constitutes the core ethical principle of transhumanism. My aim will therefore be to defend transhumanism’s central moral tenet from within the framework of vulnerability theory, by showing that ontological vulnerability has moral significance. Section 1 will introduce transhumanism’s moral objective, emphasizing the role of ontological vulnerability. Section 2 will analyze the relational and dispositional accounts of vulnerability, emphasizing the reasons why such kinds of vulnerabilities ground duties to help the vulnerable. Section 3 argues that these same reasons also ground moral obligations to remedy ontological vulnerability, therefore committing us to endorse transhumanism’s moral endeavor highlighted in section 1.