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But let’s take a step forward towards the anthropological reasons for this research. In addition to the body, what distinguishes the individual and makes one incredibly human, emotional, and self-aware of themselves and the surrounding world, beyond the survival instinct, is their intrinsic VULNERABILITY. The human being is inherently vulnerable. Not only from a biological or psychological perspective but also intellectually and morally vulnerable, in their most intimate nature. And it is precisely this vulnerability that paradoxically makes the individual human extremely strong and resilient, capable of generating quality, well-being, and security in their existence at increasingly higher levels.
A promising sign of the increase in this sensitivity, which introduces the theme of vulnerability in the perspective of a more advanced conception of human dignity and the common good, can be found in the Barcelona Declaration of 1998. It was drafted with the collaboration of twenty-two experts from different disciplines in the field of bioethics, initiated by the European Commission and coordinated by the Centre for Ethics and Law in Copenhagen.
In this text, not only is vulnerability mentioned for the first time as an integral part of the guiding principles of universal bioethics (autonomy, integrity, dignity, vulnerability), but it is also explicitly linked to the recognition of the constitutive finitude of the human condition and the urgent call for the moral responsibility of the human community.
The signal coming from this integration, which requires a certain propositional audacity, is certainly encouraging. It is encouraging because, in thinking about the present, we tend more and more to associate the concept of vulnerability with something extremely weak and fragile. However, fragility goes far beyond simply being the opposite of strong and indestructible. Fragility is the ability to be vulnerable and sensitive beyond measure: it means understanding the multiplicity of emotions, choices, and tensions that humans face daily and feeling all of that on one’s own skin.
Humans are not made of steel, they are not indestructible or impenetrable, but they are made of glass: they sway and can break, chip, hurt, and ruin themselves a little. Often, we are not ready to admit the fragility of things and ourselves and prefer to keep it hidden because daily life pushes us to associate it with a negative conception, as factors of personal and communal degradation to be marginalized and treated.
This society, despite all its undeniable progress, fails in the challenge of vulnerability: not only because it fails to generate resources of meaning for a life that appears imperfect and fallible but also because it proves inadequate in caring for and protecting the most fragile and vulnerable individuals, as if they were inevitably devoid of dignity and reasonably expendable.
The recent passage through the devastating pandemic of a largely unknown virus has shown, beyond all predictions, how disoriented, uncertain, and powerless our civil societies, even the most technologically and economically advanced ones, have proven to be in a matter of weeks, plunging us into the delusion of omnipotence.
This awareness perhaps represents the best part, at the moment, of the new anthropological sensitivity that is maturing in this confused and contradictory era of change. The collective consciousness of the wholly special profile of the constitutive vulnerability of the human being – their inclination to be hurt even in their soul by the oppression of others and by their own powerlessness – is a new aspect of our cultural evolution.
Everything suggests that the necessary rediscovery of human vulnerability, initiated by anthropological reflection and imposed by the epochal context, must play a central role, not marginal or accidental, in the reconstruction of a humanistic and civil project – economic, social, political, cultural – commensurate with our intrinsic disposition to be humiliated and even overwhelmed in our dignity as human beings.