Towards a Vulnerability-Centred Phenomenological Ethics: Personhood, Humanity and Bodily Precariousness of the Mediatized, Exiled Subject

This paper examines the particular demands that vulnerability makes on ethics with respect to the exiled ‘Other’. First, I briefly discuss the limit experience of exile in order to reflect on the notions of vulnerability and bodily precariousness as developed by J. Butler, M. A. Fineman, A. MacIntyre and M. Nussbaum. In the main part of the article, I emphasize E. Husserl’s, E. Lévinas’ and B. Waldenfels’ ethical approaches. It is within this framework that I first inquire into the possibility of a vulnerability-centred ethics that would be both universal and particular. Second, I aim to develop an ontology of the moral subject that is based on the cultivation of values, virtues and emotions. This will lay methodological basis for a material axiology. Lastly, I want to account for the experience of encountering the Other, which proves to be of central importance in the context of the de-personalisation and de-humanisation of the human subject that itself results from the process of mediatization.