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Lehrende: Dr. Costanza Porro
Veranstaltungsart:
Proseminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan:
Semesterwochenstunden:
2
Credits:
3,0
Unterrichtssprache:
Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl:
1 | 30
Kontingentschema: Phil_Standard_WS1415
Weitere Informationen:
Für den erfolgreichen Besuch dieser Veranstaltung im Rahmen des Fachspezifischen Wahbereichs werden 3 LP angerechnet.
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Kommentare/ Inhalte:
Course topic:
Vulnerability is a central feature of the human condition and as such should shape how we understand our moral and political lives. As embodied agents, we have bodily needs and all experience periods of dependency on the care of others because of age, illness, injury and disability. Moreover, as social beings we are emotionally and psychologically vulnerable to others, and a lack of care and of social recognition, as well as humiliation, rejection and abuse can compromise not just our well-being but also our sense of self and our conception of ourselves. The fact of vulnerability has long been ignored by traditional liberal philosophy, structured around an atomistic conception of the self as autonomous and independent and of rationality as distinct from human animality and embodiment. In recent decades, the critique of this tradition put forward by feminist and other philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum ((Nussbaum 2007) and Alasdair MacIntyre (MacIntyre 2009) has gained prominence and generated a growing body of literature on vulnerability.
This course aims to provide an overview of this literature by addressing three main issues. Firstly, we will explore the concept of vulnerability. We will address the main ambiguity of this concept, namely that between vulnerability understood as a universal condition that we all experience or as a special state in which vulnerable individuals or groups find themselves. In doing so, we will compare ontological accounts of vulnerability which argue that vulnerability in an essential and universal aspect of the human condition (Fineman 2008) and relation accounts which claim that one is vulnerable when he is under threat of harm because of a relationship with some other agent capable of causing that harm (Goodin 1985). We will also discuss proposal that distinguish between different types of vulnerability: inherent vulnerability, which refers to sources of vulnerability that are intrinsic to the human condition, and situational vulnerability, which is context specific and only affects particular individuals or groups of people (Mackenzie 2014). Another issue that we will address include the question of whether vulnerability is problematic per se, as some theorists suggest, or becomes so only when it gives rise to particular forms of pathogenic vulnerability (Straehle 2017). We will also explore the ways in which inherent vulnerability can give raise to these forms of objectionable vulnerability.
Secondly, we will look at a variety of approaches to the problem of the obligations arising from vulnerability, from Robert Goodin’s consequentialism (Goodin 1985) to Eva Kittay’s proposal (Kittay 1999) and the ethics of care (Held 2006). The questions that we will explore include: is vulnerability itself a source of obligations or do duties arise from other moral claims, such as those based on harm and needs? Who has the primary responsibility for responding to vulnerability and how should these duties be discharged? What is the role of care in a theory of justice?
In discussing these questions, one of our aims will be to determine whether vulnerability and the duties arising from it can be subsumed under one or more of the canonical theories of morality and justice, or instead represents an alternative to the existing proposals. Our discussion will also aim to illuminate the relationship between vulnerability and the related concepts of dependency, need, care as well as that of autonomy, often assumed to be in opposition with vulnerability (Anderson and Honneth 2005; Dodds 2013; Mackenzie 2013; 2014; Straehle 2017).
Finally, we will also look at two applications of the theorising of vulnerability. Firstly, we will look at the implications of taking seriously the fact of vulnerability in our thinking about equality in the political domain, addressing the following questions: which understanding of equality should we prefer in light of vulnerability, a distributive or a relational one (Garrau and Laborde 2015)? What are the social arrangements and structures that can produce pathogenic vulnerability that should be addressed by a theory of equality? Secondly, we will explore the problem of disability, with the aim of determining what different models of disability can tell us about the vulnerability of those with disability, in particular in answering the question of whether it makes sense to claim that those living with disability are subject to a special type of vulnerability, which is of a different order from inherent vulnerability (Kittay 1999; Scully 2013)
Course structure:
The course will be taught with a combination of zoom live meetings, video lectures and forum discussions.
Literatur:
Anderson, Joel & Honneth, Axel "Autonomy, vulnerability, recognition, and justice" In Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays, edited by J. Christman & J. Anderson, 127-149. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Davis, Lennard J. The Disability Studies Reader. 4th ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013.
Fineman, Martha. 'The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition'. Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 20, No. 1 (2008): 8-40.
Fineman, Martha. 'The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State'. Emory Law Journal 60 (2010).
Fourie, Carina, Schuppert, Fabian and Wallimann-Helmer, Ivo, ed.Social Equality: On What It Means to Be Equals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Goodin, Robert E. Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford ?; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Kittay, Eva Feder. Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. Thinking gender. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Kittay, Eva Feder. 'At the Margins of Moral Personhood'. Ethics 116, no. 1 (October 2005): 100-131.
MacIntyre, Alasdair C. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. London: Duckworth, 2009.
Mackenzie, Catriona, ed. Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. Studies in Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Mackenzie, Catriona, and Natalie Stoljar, eds. Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Automony, Agency, and the Social Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Nussbaum, Martha. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 'The Future of Feminist Liberalism'. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 74, no. 2 (November 2000): 47-97
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass .: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Rogers, Wendy, Catriona MacKenzie, and Susan Dodds. 'Why Bioethics Needs a Concept of Vulnerability'. International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 5, no. 2 (2012): 11-38.
Scotch, Richard K., and Kay Schriner. 'Disability as Human Variation: Implications for Policy'. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 549, no. 1 (January 1997): 148-59. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716297549001011.
Straehle, Christine, ed. Vulnerability, Autonomy, and Applied Ethics. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Whitney, Shiloh Y. Dependency Relations: Corporeal Vulnerability and Norms of Personhood in Hobbes and Kittay. Hypatia, 26 (2011): 554-574.
Zusätzliche Hinweise zu Prüfungen:
Studienleistung
Careful preparation and active participation during the seminar
Other assignments, such as student presentations, might be announced at the start of the course
Prüfungsleistung
Term paper of 4500 words
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