In this article I examine several criticisms of the concept of vulnerability. Rather than rejecting the concept, however, I argue that a sufficiently rich understanding of vulnerability is essential to bioethics. The challenges of international research in developing countries require an understanding of how new vulnerabilities arise from conditions of economic, social and political exclusion. A serious shortcoming of current conceptions of vulnerability in research ethics is the tendency to treat vulnerability as a label fixed on a particular subpopulation. My (...) paper examines the role of this “label” metaphor in current statements of research ethics. In contrast to this prevailing “label” metaphor, my own positive account of vulnerability develops a dynamic way of understanding the structure of the concept of vulnerability based on the idea of “layers of vulnerability.” I examine several cases involving women, as they are sometimes labeled as a vulnerable population and sometimes not. My analysis demonstrates the essential role of this revised concept of vulnerability in bioethics and research ethics. (shrink)

Women’s access to health and medicine in developed countries has been characterized by a range of inconsistent inclusions and exclusions. Health policy has been asymmetrically interested in women’s reproductive capacities and has sought to regulate, control, and manage aspects of women’s reproductive decision making in a manner unwitnessed in relation to men’s reproductive health and reproductive decision making. In other areas, research that addresses health concerns that affect both men and women sometimes is designed so as not to yield data (...) relating to the ways in which women’s physiology and gendered location may affect their experience of the condition and its response to treatment, despite a literature on the significance of sex and gender differences in health research. This paper draws on the situation in Australia to explore the ethical significance of these inconsistencies as failing the ideals of high-quality medical research and evidenced-based health care. (shrink)

This paper aims to refute the idea whereby giving consideration to vulnerability can only lead to an ethics, or is only relative to a politics derived from morality. I first shed some light on the seeming impossibility experienced by a large number of contemporary theories of vulnerability to fully think the political. Second, I define what one overlooks in the political when one simply considers it as a sphere of implementation of moral principles. Finally, I interpret care theories as an (...) attempt to overcome the difficulty of thinking the political from the viewpoint of vulnerability, and I define the political as a movement of reengaging with and transforming what is already instituted. (shrink)

Across contexts and time, subjects marked by racial difference have expressed public accounts of the multiple injuries of race. From the vantage point of critical race and black theory, this paper sheds light on both the heuristic and critical political values of such accounts. The first part critically reassesses conceptualizations of vulnerability as an ambivalent ontological condition within critical approaches to liberalism. A close reading of Fanon's account of injury in Black Skin, White Masks specifies how race exploits bodily and (...) enunciative vulnerability and materializes subjects into a state of suspension and suspicion. The second part addresses the political promise of accounts of racialized injury. Departing from sceptical readings of “wounded attachment,” critical race and black analyses associate accounts of injury with citational practices that pertain to historically entrenched conventions of resistance to racial and colonial abusive power. Such accounts can be read as misappropriations of race which expand the horizon of the human. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview, prepared by Robert Castel himself, of his last book, La montée des incertitudes. It describes how a new regime of capitalism has weakened and sometimes destroyed forms of social organization that had been established at the end of industrial capitalism. It discloses three main ongoing transformations: Labour market deregulations – in the sense of questioning both the right to work and the employment statute, and advances in insecurity; The reconfiguration of protective measures – in the (...) sense of the restriction of rights and a rapid rise in social insecurity; The paths of disaffiliation – or how it is that some categories of individuals find themselves destabilized and threatened with social invalidation in this new conjuncture. (shrink)

The long republican tradition is characterized by a conception of freedom as non‐domination, which offers an alternative, both to the negative view of freedom as non‐interference and to the positive view of freedom as self‐mastery. The first part of the book traces the rise and decline of the conception, displays its many attractions and makes a case for why it should still be regarded as a central political ideal. The second part of the book looks at the sorts of political (...) and civil institutions that would be required in a society in which freedom as non‐domination is systematically fostered. It outlines the causes and policies, the constitutional and democratic forms, and the regulatory controls that a republican state ought to endorse. And it argues for a vision of the state's relation to civil society in which there is no pretence of doing without widespread civility and trust; the argument is that the state ought, at once, to foster and build on such extra‐political foundations. (shrink)

Introduction : nothing in common -- Fear -- Guilt -- Law -- Ecstasy -- Experience -- Appendix : nihilism and community.

Book reviewed in this article: Protecting The Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. By Robert E. Goodin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

One of the dominating themes in the first part is the negative treatment that Marx’s concept of labor has received by late critical theorists, particularly Habermas. While supportive of the rejection of Marx’s economic functionalism entailed by Habermas’s adoption of communicative action as the basic category of critical theory, Honneth worries about the indifference towards the normative potential of labor that he sees in most twentieth-century social theory. Honneth agrees with critics of reductionism that labor is neither the only form (...) of social reproduction, nor a primary source of emancipatory consciousness, as the fragmentation and depolitization of a working class that has suffered the effects of Taylorism clearly manifests. But Honneth is still convinced that the experience of recognition is to a large extent associated with work, and that Habermas tends to understand interaction in terms of instrumental action, making the concept of interaction inadequate to capture the sort of normative claims expressed by workers who do not see themselves sufficiently recognized in the labor they do. Although Honneth acknowledges that he has not settled how to navigate between these competing interests, the clarity of the call for a more complex concept of labor justifies the inclusion of these papers in the volume. (shrink)