The High Court continues to exercise its inherent jurisdiction to make declarations about interventions into the lives of situationally vulnerable adults with mental capacity. In light of protective responses of health care providers and the courts to decision-making situations involving capacitous vulnerable adults, this paper has two aims. The first is diagnostic. The second is normative. The first aim is to identify the harms to a capacitous vulnerable adult’s autonomy that arise on the basis of the characterisation of situational vulnerability (...) and autonomy as fundamentally opposed concepts or the failure to adequately acknowledge the conceptual relationship between them at common law. The second part of this aim is to draw upon developments in analytic feminist philosophy to illustrate how standard approaches to autonomy are ill-equipped to capture the autonomy issues of capacitous vulnerable adults when their decisions regarding care and treatment are at stake. The second (normative) aim is to develop an account of self-authorised, intersubjective autonomy on the basis of analytic feminist insights into the relational practices of recognition. This account not only attempts to capture the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults and account for the necessary harms to their autonomy that arise from standard common law responses to their situational vulnerability, it is also predicated on the distinctions between mental capacity, the satisfaction of conditions for informed consent and the exercise of autonomy, meaning that it is better placed to fulfil the primary aim of the inherent jurisdiction – to facilitate the autonomy of vulnerable adults with capacity. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to literature on the conceptualisation of ‘vulnerability’ and its use by neo-liberal welfare regimes to demean, stigmatize and responsibilize welfare recipients. Several conceptions of ‘vulnerability’ will be explored and utilised in the context of welfare reforms that purport to regulate social security recipients as highly risky ‘vulnerable’ subjects. However, as this article will make clear, ‘vulnerability’ is a somewhat slippery concept and one susceptible to abuse by powerful interests intent on increasing coercive surveillance, discipline and (...) disentitlement for those designated as ‘vulnerable’. Legislation enacted ostensibly to address the ‘vulnerability’ of welfare recipients can foster intensive regulation and it must be asked who benefits most from such arrangements and the rhetoric that supports them. (shrink)

Frailty has recently become a medical category with physical symptoms that define its diagnosis. This paper uses the resources of an ethics of care to analyze the relationship between frailty and fragility or vulnerability, the positives of frailty becoming a diagnostic category, and some problematic aspects of the same process.

Most work addressing clinical workers' professional responsibilities concerns the norms of conduct within established professional–patient relationships, but such responsibilities may extend beyond the clinical context. We explore health workers' professional responsibilities in such “informal” encounters through the example of a doctor witnessing the misdiagnosis and mistreatment of a serious long-term condition in a television documentary, arguing that neither internalist approaches to professional responsibility nor externalist ones provide sufficiently clear guidance in such situations. We propose that a mix of both approaches, (...) emphasizing the noncomplacency and practical wisdom of virtue ethics, but grounding the normative authority of virtue in an external source, is able to engage with the health worker's responsibilities in such situations to the individual, the health care system, and the population at large. (shrink)

The psycho-social day-to-day experience of COVID-19 pandemic has shone some light on the wider scope of health vulnerability and has correspondingly enlarged the ethical debate surrounding the social implications of health and healthcare. This emerging paradigm is neither a single-handed problem of biomedical scientists nor of social analysts. It instead needs a strategically oriented collaborative and interdisciplinary preventive effort. To that effect, this article presents some socio-ethical reflections underscoring the judicious use of the insight from care ethics as an asset (...) in minimizing the possible propagation of the COVID-19 virus and the escalation of its vulnerability in the day-to-day human interaction. It further emphasizes that if this insight is overlooked, the effects of the diverse facets of the “shadow pandemics” of COVID-19—fallouts on both the affected and the infected—may equally be deadly. (shrink)

The notion of vulnerable groups has gained relevance in international legal instruments while being criticised in philosophical literature for its disabling potential and disempowering consequences. The article argues that the category of group vulnerability should not be abandoned, being an opportunity for resistance, visibility, and a place for dissent: vulnerable groups can both function as a sounding board for claims and make demands for recognition, resetting the political agenda and the topics of public debate, and allow the level of collective (...) needs to emerge from the level of individual interests, thereby guaranteeing a fairer distribution of resources. For this purpose, the article provides two definitions of group vulnerability that avoid both the risks of essentialism and of labelling outcomes. The article also analyses the political value of vulnerable groups, highlighting that it is conceivable as an enabling condition, a source of political agency and mobilisation. (shrink)