Since a number of years, popular and scientific interest in resilience is rapidly increasing. More recently, also neuroscientific research in resilience and the associated neurobiological findings is gaining more attention. Some of these neuroscientific findings might open up new measures to foster personal resilience, ranging from magnetic stimulation to pharmaceutical interventions and awareness-based techniques. Therefore, bioethics should also take a closer look at resilience and resilience research, which are today philosophically under-theorized. In this paper, we analyze different conceptualizations of resilience (...) and argue that especially one-sided understandings of resilience which dismiss social and cultural contexts of personal resilience do pose social and ethical problems. On a social level such unbalanced views on resilience could hide and thereby stabilize structural social injustices, and on an individual level it might even lead to an aggravation of stress-related mental health problems by overexerting the individual. Furthermore, some forms of fostering resilience could be a latent form of human enhancement and trigger similar criticisms. (shrink)

It has been suggested that there is a troubling antagonism between the potential goods afforded for parents in the parent–child relationship, and the goods of childhood. Indeed, the problem appears deep: on one way of framing it the problem is not merely that realisation of the goods of parenting for parents is incompatible with realisation of the goods of childhood for children; it is that realisation of the parental goods of parenting is dependent on precisely what it is that makes (...) childhood bad for children, namely their dependency and vulnerability.In this paper I consider this supposed ‘vulnerability paradox’, as I will refer to it. I argue for a re-assessment and revaluation of the vulnerability in the parent–child relationship by developing an account of the crucial role that vulnerability plays in underpinning and facilitating what is a core – but as yet unrecognised – good of that relationship for both parents and children: namely what I call the good of ‘mutual reflexive co-constitution’ that the relationship enables. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the legal position of those who perform caregiving work within the context of a cohabiting relationship through a novel relational vulnerability lens. I argue that the state, through privatising and devaluing caregiving labour, situates carers within an unequal and imbalanced relational framework, exposing them economic, emotional, and spatial harms. Unlike universal vulnerability, which is inherent and unavoidable, relational vulnerability can be avoided and reduced if the state were to acknowledge that humans are embodied and relational (...) rather than self-sufficient and rational. Law’s treatment of cohabiting carers reflects the state’s broader tendency to value economic self-sufficiency, while confining caregiving to the private family. I argue that the state has a duty to respond directly to relational vulnerability and should aim to make cohabiting carers resilient. Resilience must involve the provision of material resources but should also have a normative commitment to achieving autonomy and equality for those marginalised by law and state policies. (shrink)