Abstract
In Part I, I have outlined an existential-phenomenological approach to risk and vulnerability according to which we are always already being-at-risk, rendering ourselves vulnerable by engaging with the world. I have also argued that in our struggle against vulnerability, we create new vulnerabilities and thereby transform ourselves as much as we transform the world. Now I want to show that this relational anthropology of risk and vulnerability has important implications for ethics of risk and the evaluation of new technologies. We need a normative anthropology of vulnerability which does not ask which objective risks are acceptable but what the human should become—that is, which vulnerability transformations we want.
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- 1.
Note the influence of Foucault here (Foucault 1977).
- 2.
Turner distinguishes three dimensions of embodiment: ‘one can talk about having a body in which the body has the characteristics of a thing, being a body in which we are subjectively engaged with our body as a project, and doing a body in the sense of producing a body through time’ (Turner 2003, p. 281). With Merleau-Ponty, we can say that the body is not only an object (Körper) but also lived experience (Leib). However, I insist that the concept of ‘embodiment’, even if broadly conceived in this way, is still not rich enough to do justice to the relational nature of vulnerability.
- 3.
This is also why vulnerability cannot be measured, in contrast to what Turner suggests. Of course we have ‘indices of disease, disability, chronic illness, morbidity, life expectancy’ (Turner 2003, p. 280), etc., but such statistics do not reflect people’s experience. An empirical study that seeks to complement a philosophical inquiry into vulnerability must not only take into account statistical and other ‘data’ but should also look at other approaches such as narrative accounts of lived and personal experience. (See for example Jackson’s phenomenological anthropology as referred to in Chap. 3.)
- 4.
Hannah Arendt, too, makes this point in her later work: ethical responsibility is related to my inability to do something or to live a certain life: I cannot do it. More precisely, it is related to my inability to imagine acting such and living such a life.
- 5.
My objections need not imply moral relativism in the sense of a belief in the absence of any ground for ethics. I leave the question concerning the foundation of ethics open at this point.
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Coeckelbergh, M. (2013). Ethics of Vulnerability (i): Implications for Ethics of Technology. In: Human Being @ Risk. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6025-7_5
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