ABSTRACT
Vulnerability has been the subject of and impetus for much feminist thinking and activism about ethics and social justice. In recent years, scholarship and discussion of the theme of vulnerability has expanded significantly (e.g., Bergoffen, 2011; Butler, 2004, 2009; Drichel, 2013; Fineman and Grear, 2013; Gilson, 2014; Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, 2014). The aim of this chapter is to analyze some practical challenges faced by a feminist ethics of vulnerability in Western neoliberal societies, specifically in the context of the US. In particular, the chapter seeks to account for the allure of an ideal of invulnerability that hinders the creation of ethical and just actions and policies in response to vulnerability. The central argument suggests that culturally prevalent conceptions of risk, danger, and responsibility contribute to the appeal of invulnerability, and are constitutive of an entrepreneurial mode of subjectivity that requires privatization of risk. In the context of this chapter, privatization has both a rhetorical and a literal sense: it refers both to how vulnerabilities and risks are rhetorically deemed an issue of private individual responsibility rather than public concern and to how responsibility is actually shifted from the public, collective sphere to the private sphere of the corporate world and individual choice. The overarching contention is that entrepreneurial subjectivity results in specific ethically damaging consequences: first, since entrepreneurial subjectivity relies on a reductively negative view of vulnerability, individuals are increasingly averse to vulnerability, regarding it not just as a condition to avoid but also as a bad character trait to possess; second, the vulnerabilities of others and one’s self are consequently regarded as products of failures of responsibility rather than conditions common to human experience;
third, accordingly, responsibility for risk and for common human vulnerabilities is increasingly privatized rather than shared. Thus, entrepreneurial subjectivity contributes to an inability to recognize the full normative significance of vulnerability, and respond ethically to both the vulnerabilities of others in adverse conditions and vulnerability as a common feature of life.
