ABSTRACT
This chapter examines why causality might be so problematic in vulnerability studies by exploring how causes of risk are entangled in social order, and with blame, liability and responsibility, and therefore why they are highly contentious and often avoided. The lack of adaptive capacity or of assets, or of social protections, is the product of a larger stratified institutional environment. The rationalization, and thus containing and explaining, of suffering is a foundational element of social organization and of any governing system. Indeed, adaptation terminology carries an implicit survival-of-the-fittest social-Darwinist ethic that blames the victim by locating failure within the adjusting or affected unit – in their adaptive capacity. In an emancipatory polity, the discursive conduct of conduct will be challenged, and the social revived from its injured retreat. God and nature will be held at bay. In a democratic polity, which few of seem to occupy, science would be continuously pressured to reflect experience and need.
