La vulnérabilité en question ?

Being vulnerable means being hurt: physically injured, morally wounded and psychologically or socially injured when banned from society. Vulnerability in our societies presents many faces: each of them constitutes a singular experience of fragility or dependence, almost always domination, in an individualistic society that tends to make everyone responsible for his life and destiny. Within a decade, vulnerability has become central to social and political thinking. According to contexts and authors, “vulnerability” refers to fragility, dependence, loss of autonomy, exclusion, social invisibility, precariousness, disaffiliation, etc. And this often in the greatest confusion. Moreover, these different terms are very often used to describe and enclose groups of people who are marginalized in society: the elderly, people with disabilities or persons with disabilities, the unemployed, the poor, Immigrants, homeless people, etc. Finally, these terms present a negative and deficient view of the populations that they contribute to stigmatize. The inability for some of us to be heard and to be understood by others has become a major source of the various situations of vulnerability that each of us may face. This “linguistic or linguistic” vulnerability (Paul Ricœur) is undoubtedly one of the major forms of situations of vulnerability, since oral and written language is one of the privileged vehicles of communication between human beings. In the current literature, vulnerability is considered as a state of the person and most often associated with, or even confused with, frailty. Logically, the most fragile populations are then systematically labeled as the most vulnerable, such as the poor, the disabled and the elderly. It seems therefore urgent to get out of this semantic confusion. If frailty or disability is an intrinsic dimension and a state of the individual at some point in his/her life, vulnerability is first and foremost dynamics and an interaction between the person and his wider environment. The vulnerability of individuals is above all the mark of the relation to the other, it resides essentially in the exposure to the other. Besides, rather than a vulnerability attribute of a subject, it is therefore preferable to speak of a situation of vulnerability in which is engaged the same subject. The fragility due to a deficiency or deficiency of the individual may therefore not lead to a situation of vulnerability through an adequate environment (in the broadest sense of the term) capable of enabling the individual to choose his/her way of life and to implement his desires and values, even if he cannot do it alone. This allows us to tackle some of the ways in which social functioning can reduce situations of vulnerability through the concepts of relational autonomy, capabilities and inclusive society. The common idea underlying all these terms is an inclusive society, an accessible society, a society of capabilities, a society of individuals where each person is as little as possible confronted with situations that would make them more vulnerable than the average of the individuals who make up this society. In fact, we are all vulnerable because each one is constituted in the relationship with others. On the other hand, contrary to a commonly held idea, vulnerability and autonomy are not opposed; they are the condition of each other and in a reciprocal way. Vulnerability is our common fund of humanity and it is only based on this recognition of our common vulnerability that we can contribute to the autonomy of those who appear more vulnerable than we are.