Institutskolloquium

Vulnerability has often been described as an inherently human characteristic. In this ontological sense, humans are vulnerable due to the embodied nature of human lives. A second way of conceptualizing vulnerability has proposed it as a constraint to individual autonomy. The argument then is that those who are vulnerable are not able to take decisions about the course of their lives since their decision-making capacity is hampered by dependency on the acts of another. Accordingly, morally problematic vulnerability arises in interaction with another.

In this paper, I explore the concept of vulnerability with these two uses in mind. I suggest that a neglected aspect of individual vulnerability is the limits it may pose for epistemological capacity. In particular, I am interested in how specific circumstances of individual vulnerability may challenge the role individual introspection can play in leading autonomous lives. I want to argue that individual vulnerability can jeopardize the role introspection is usually assumed to play in deciding what course we hope to give our lives. In some cases of vulnerability, individuals may not be able to endorse and take responsibility for choices they make due to the fact that they don’t trust their introspective knowledge. In this way, vulnerable individuals loose the authoritative grip on their introspective self-knowledge. Yet self-knowledge is a vital condition of individual autonomy: without self-knowledge, individuals lack the internal requirements of personal autonomy.

Fichte on Rape
17-19Uhr

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How is someone's individual autonomy threatened in old age? It is easy to list factors: pain, suffering, physical incapacity, cognitive decline, dependency, social isolation, maybe others. But none of these things is either essential to that context – someone can be dying without pain, or mentally but not physically incapacitated – and none of them is exclusive to it – someone can be very dependent without a terminal illness, and physically disabled at any time of life. It is therefore interesting that existing ethical discussion of old age have focused almost exclusively on these factors, and not on the fact of old age itself. Does that fact have ethical significance in itself? Specifically – for my purposes – could old age by itself pose a threat to autonomy?
In this paper, I argue that it does. By 'old age' I mean two things: someone not having much time left to live, and someone having lived a long time. Each of these aspects poses distinctive problems for autonomy, and these problems don't depend on the presence of the contingent factors listed above (though they may coexist and exacerbate each other).

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