Philosophy

As concerns about violence, war, terrorism, sexuality, and embodiment have garnered attention in philosophy, the concept of vulnerability has become a shared reference point in these discussions. As a fundamental part of the human condition, vulnerability has significant ethical import: how one responds to vulnerability matters, whom one conceives as vulnerable and which criteria are used to make such demarcations matters, how one deals with one’s own vulnerability matters, and how one understands the meaning of vulnerability matters. Yet, the meaning of vulnerability is commonly taken for granted and it is assumed that vulnerability is almost exclusively negative, equated with weakness, dependency, powerlessness, deficiency, and passivity. This reductively negative view leads to problematic implications, imperiling ethical responsiveness to vulnerability, and so prevents the concept from possessing the normative value many theorists wish it to have. When vulnerability is regarded as weakness and, concomitantly, invulnerability is prized, attentiveness to one’s own vulnerability and ethical response to vulnerable others remain out of reach goals. Thus, this book critiques the ideal of invulnerability, analyzes the problems that arise from a negative view of vulnerability, and articulates in its stead a non-dualistic concept of vulnerability that can remedy these problems.

As popular food writers and activists urge consumers to express their social, political, and ethical commitments through their food choices, the imperative to ‘vote with your fork’ has become a common slogan of emerging food movements in the US. I interrogate the conception of responsibility embedded in this dictate, which has become a de facto model for how to comport ourselves ethically with respect to food. I argue that it implicitly endorses a narrow and problematic understanding of responsibility. To contextualize this claim, I utilize Iris Marion Young’s critique of a “liability model” of responsibility to demonstrate that voting with one’s fork is insufficient as model for taking responsibility for food-related injustices. Instead, I suggest that Young’s social connection model of responsibility is best suited for taking stock of responsibility for food and agriculture related injustices since they are structural and systemic ones. I conclude that although consumer choices and purchases may be important dimensions of our conduct with respect to food and eating, imagining responsibility to be centered on this type of conduct—consumer behavior—is detrimental to attempts to develop a more just food system.

This paper articulates how core concepts in feminist ethical and social theory such as vulnerability, relationality, and dependency are central for understanding injustices in contemporary food systems and how best to pursue food justice. It argues that denials of dependency, relationality, and vulnerability take the form of normal but ethically problematic attitudes and practices, such as reductionism, detachment, and privatization. Thus, they constitute the underlying shared roots of myriad agricultural and food-related injustices. This feminist approach helps resolve the tension between critiques of the industrial food system and critiques of the socio-cultural politics of food and health.

Vulnerability is both a vexing and vital concept for feminist theorizing about sexual violence and victimization. The concept is widely perceived as problematic because of the way it is associated both with femininity and femaleness, and with dependency, weakness, susceptibility to harm, and violability; that is, vulnerability is thought to connote an inherent weakness and unavoidable openness to sexual victimization for women. Yet, feminist thinkers also find the concept of vulnerability productive in light of how it decenters the purported autonomous subject, calls attention to the relational constitution of selves and to the reality of mutual and inevitable interdependence, and holds the promise of new kinds of ethical orientations. This essay argues that a conception of vulnerability is crucial for feminist theory and, specifically, feminist thought and activism concerning sexual violence, but must be critically rethought just as many feminist theorists have critically analyzed the ideas of 'victimization' and 'victim.' Thus, it critically assesses potential problems with the concept and suggests an alternative conceptualization. One central feature of vulnerability that must be recognized is ambiguity. Reframing vulnerability with a focus on its ambiguity both offers a more accurate concept and enables a better understanding of the wrongs associated with rape and other types of sexual victimization. That is, the wrong inheres in exploiting and appropriating another's ambiguous vulnerability thus reducing its plasticity.

Throughout this chapter, I seek to explain ignorance of a particular pattern of susceptibility, susceptibility to sexual violence, in terms of a deeper ignorance, that which concerns the phenomenon of vulnerability in general. In the first two sections I present the methodological background for this inquiry, considering first how ignorance is schematized by philosophers engaged in social criticism, and then how vulnerability has been conceptualized in relationship to ethical and political concerns. The third section sketches the forms taken by ignorance of vulnerability, focusing on the particular case of ignorance concerning rape and sexual assault. I propose that many types of ignorance are under-girded by one particular type: willful ignorance. Moreover, in relation to rape and rape culture, this kind of ignorance takes the form of denials of the fundamental nature of vulnerability as a social and corporeal condition.

This talk explores the issue of responsibility for the continuum of occurrences that comprise ‘sexual injustice.’ It analyzes how responsibility is conceived and practiced within a neoliberal framework for meaning, arguing that a  neoliberal framing of responsibility undermines nuanced and adequate responses to sexual injustices. The talk analyzes some key features of neoliberal governmentality, the specific shape responsibility takes in neoliberal society, the implications of this conception of responsibility for sexual life, and then explores how Black feminist theory critiques this framing of responsibility. In conclusion, I sketch an outline of a conception of responsibility for sexual injustices that might be more adequate, responding both to the problems inherent in neoliberalism and to the critical concerns of an intersectional feminism.

This talk identifies specific modifications to human spatial and temporal experience that produce disparities in harmful vulnerability and elaborates why they are unjust. In light of this analysis, I contend that common ways of discussing safety and security must be questioned because of how these aims are frequently sought as a form of invulnerability for some achieved through the creation of harmful vulnerability for others. Thus, I explore how to redefine safety and security in a more just manner by abandoning the focus on spatial (and, correspondingly, psychic) boundedness - a focus illustrated through the common anxiety about national borders - by turning instead to consideration of the quality of relations that constitute people and places. How might we conceive of safety without opposing it to vulnerability, and without equating it with impermeability and invulnerability, with being closed off? And, finally, how might the discourse and concept of care facilitate this reconceptualization?

This essay elaborates how an imbalanced reciprocity between inhabitants of places of relative safety and places of greater precarity results from pursuing security on the basis of a reactive fear of vulnerability. It analyzes a range of features that shape the complex forms that vulnerability takes with a particular focus on how the constitution of places as rhetorically and corporeally secure or not renders different groups of people secure and/or subject to heightened exposure to harm. This analysis suggests that vulnerability is better conceived as a process than a quality, mediating between conceptions of vulnerability as a universal condition and as a highly specific empirical condition. Finally, by departing from the negative, reactive view of vulnerability that animates the supposition of the boundedness of selves and places, an alternative conception of security that neither equates it with invulnerability nor opposes it to vulnerability can be developed.