This chapter analyses how phenomenological explorations on autism and research on the double empathy problem can mutually elucidate the intertwinement of empathy, vulnerability, and emotions in autism spectrum disorder. The chapter starts with research findings from phenomenological psychopathology concerning difficulties in affective empathy and emotions in autism spectrum disorder. What is sometimes neglected in these studies, however, are the exclusionary and stigmatizing experiences that people with autism are often exposed to. With a selection of first-person reports and insights from double empathy research, it is then analysed how individuals with autism experience the challenges of emotional regulation and empathy in social arrangements. Based on this analysis, the original hypothesis in phenomenological psychopathology is in a further step explicated as the disturbance of affective contact or resonance. The latter includes the entire social relationship among persons both with and without autism and not only unique symptoms of the autism spectrum disorders. Finally, it is discussed how both research perspectives enlighten and complement each other in exploring autism spectrum disorder.

In this chapter, the phenomenology of emotions in people with schizophrenia is explored. A nuanced understanding of the specific emotional challenges in schizophrenia, together with their transformative potential, can inform psychotherapeutic and rehabilitative approaches and help to uncover their healing dimensions. The first section of the chapter examines the emotional world of the person with schizophrenia, focusing on profound emotional vulnerabilities and the alienating role that emotions can assume in this condition. The second section turns to the edge of human experience that gives rise to breakthrough and transformative experiences, all of which are intimately tied to emotion. People with schizophrenia often have a low threshold for a range of such breakthrough experiences, from falling into a ‘black hole’ of utter despair and anxiety‑laden psychotic states to moments of clarity and insight that resemble mystical experiences. The third section explores the therapeutic and healing potentials inherent in these emotional states.

This chapter explores the intersection of Aristotle’s virtue ethics and Husserl’s phenomenology within the context of dementia research, emphasising the concept of habits. By introducing curability as the counter-pole to vulnerability, the chapter highlights a shift towards integrating medical and philosophical perspectives. It argues that embodied practices, regarded as meaningful, are key in both preventing and treating dementia. Through Aristotle’s ethics, the chapter examines malign habitualisation in touch with the preventive turn. Here, the vice of intemperance is related to excessive alcohol consumption, alcohol dependence, and Korsakoff’s dementia. Through Husserl’s phenomenology, the chapter examines the power of benign habitualisation, connecting embodiment, narrativity, and affectivity. Drawing on a video of Marta Cinta, a former ballerina with Alzheimer’s, the chapter rethinks influential concepts, such as narrative identity and second nature, through the lens of embodiment. The chapter ultimately demonstrates that embodied habits, when perceived as meaningful, can aid in balancing health, well-being, and eudaimonia. Focusing on the affective sphere, the study contemplates whether we can still feel home in embodied habits despite dementia.

This chapter makes the case for a robust conception of agency within emotional experience, challenging the traditional view of emotions as passive. Emotions are not simply endured but enacted; they are best understood as forms of spontaneous, reason-responsive engagement that express an agent’s evaluative stance towards their situation. Drawing on Jean Moritz Müller’s account of emotional spontaneity and expanding it through Richard Moran’s concept of the practical stance, the chapter develops a view of emotions as modes of situated responsiveness that manifest a person’s commitments and concerns. It is argued that the emotion-constitutive agency involves capacities to construe and formulate an evolving response to the agent’s existential situation. Moreover, emotions are shown to be not just reflective of the agent’s vulnerabilities but also mediums through which vulnerability is inhabited, negotiated, and at times resisted.

This chapter offers a novel account of trust as a form of opening one’s mind to the autonomy of other persons. Despite a long tradition of philosophical thinking about trust, it remains unclear how (non-instrumental) trust works in close human relationships. While important strands of theorising in sociology and moral psychology recognise that trust involves accepted vulnerability, the autonomy of the trusted person is typically viewed as something to be coped with rather than embraced. By drawing on a central distinction in Husserl’s phenomenology, the chapter proposes shifting the perspective and placing the other’s autonomy at the centre of the trusting attitude in close relationships. A personalistic perspective on trust emphasises shared goals and values with the trusted individual, shaping the affective attitude towards them. To understand the affective dynamics involved in sharing and adjusting one’s goals or values in interpersonal trust, the authors suggest conceptualising attitudinal aspects of trust as a metacognitive feeling that entails a self-explorative dimension. The chapter demonstrates how this self-explorative dimension helps explain the dynamics of disclosing intimate details and adopting another’s perspective in psychotherapeutic relationships, or what is referred to as transformative trust.

This chapter explores the intricate relationship between our emotional abilities – that is, our individual skills and capacities to feel, engage in, sustain, or modify emotions – and the experience of vulnerability. It sheds light on three connections between our emotional life and how vulnerability manifests in our experience of self, world, and others. First, it introduces the notion of ‘affective mercy’, referring to the fact that, in shaping our affective experiences, we remain dependent on something that is not fully within our control. Second, proposing a view of emotions as modal experiences of value, it suggests that emotional experience inherently involves a sense of vulnerability. Third, it distinguishes explicit feelings of vulnerability from this more implicit, background sense of vulnerability. To clarify the relevance of emotional abilities for the experience of vulnerability, the interplay of these three connections is discussed via the example of vulnerable narcissism.

This chapter focuses on the painful quality of emotional experience and aims for a phenomenological conceptualisation of affective suffering. This endeavour addresses issues such as the relation between vulnerability and emotions, the role of our embodied experience in painful emotions, the formation and deformation of our sense-making in affective suffering, the weight of passivity and activity in such experiences, as well as the role of a primary sociality. The phenomenological exploration uses Wehrle’s differentiation between experience-oriented and discourse-oriented approaches to encompass contributions from phenomenological psychopathology (Fuchs, Waldenfels, Ratcliffe) and contributions from politico-ethical accounts of vulnerability (Butler, Mackenzie, Rogers, Dodds, Boublil, Huth, and Thonhauser), combining structures of existential experience with the constitution of subjects through normative discourses. The concepts are illustrated by psychotherapeutic grief counselling. The objective is to offer a philosophical framework for practical psychotherapeutic work with clients and psychotherapy research.

Chapter 7 begins with a discussion of how colonialism and the climate issue in the MENA are strongly linked, and how this relationship affects not only development trajectories, but also the status of the climate as a policy area and women’s representation. The second part of the chapter covers Othering, that is, the portrayal of women as vulnerable victims or saviours, focusing on the dangers of feminizing vulnerability and responsibility, whilst also showcasing how Othering of women in the Global South occurs among female parliamentarians in the MENA. In terms of the global climate crisis, this has led to a situation where the climate issue is not prioritized as much as it could be if the female parliamentarians were more accountable to the electorate and identified more strongly with a broader group of women, that is, beyond the narrow elite segment of the population from which they themselves were recruited. At present, those that are the most passionate about combatting the climate crisis are the youth, whereas those who stand to gain the most are marginalized women — two groups that are nothing like the female parliamentarians, who are supposed to act in their interest.

The element of duty of care is covered in three sections. Section 11.1 covers the role and nature of duty – what it is there for and what it covers. Section 11.2 deals with the law on the established categories of negligence (duties and immunities). Section 11.3 discusses the methodology of negligence in cases involving novel fact scenarios, where a duty is not pre-established and needs to be developed from scratch.

Because of the complexity of this area of the law, this chapter introduces a new ‘Summary points’ feature at the ends of sections 11.1 and 11.3. It summarises the matters you should take into account when approaching a problem question and asks you to engage in an active reading exercise, linking each point with a case in that section.

Moving beyond the structural antagonism of criminal law, this chapter explores the subject positions of actors in scenarios of sexual harm. If the sex offender emerges as a felon bearing the head of a wolf, the victimized white child emerges as the exemplary figure of vulnerability. While tropes of vulnerability are mobilized to justify paternalistic state coercion, they are also a powerful reminder of humans’ interdependence and mutuality. Thinking with vulnerability as an analytical category focuses attention on the lingering traumatic effects of sexual assault, as well as the severe punitiveness toward sex offenders. Addressing sexual violence does not require draconian penalties; conversely, addressing carceral expansion does not necessitate minimizing sexual violence. Centering vulnerability may allow us to rethink the foundations of our social contract in ways that acknowledge both our precariousness and the sovereign violence that holds us in its thrall.

While it has been argued that relational egalitarianism can capture the vulnerability to inequalities of people’s self-respect, the relationship between vulnerability and relational equality remains largely underexplored. In this chapter, I embark on this project, with a particular focus on risk. I argue that both risk and vulnerability capture situations in which there is a possibility of harm, but harm has not yet materialised and I claim that a number of situations in which one’s interests are at risk of harm matter for relational egalitarians. Sometimes risks and vulnerabilities amount to relationships of domination, in other cases exposure to risk, especially when unequal, signals a failure of the state to treat citizens as equals. Bringing together the literature on vulnerability and risk, which are rarely put in dialogue, is key in reflecting on the terms on which people are able to relate to each other as equals: this ex-ante outlook brings to the forefront the different ways in which risk and vulnerability not only can amount to objectionable forms of inequality but can also endanger equality. This, I argue, should lead relational egalitarians to regard the commitment to the robust protection of people’s equal status as central to their theory.

If society should treat its members as equals, how can they be unequal in the possession of some valuable goods? In this chapter, I develop a novel relational egalitarian answer to this question. I argue that relational egalitarians must hold that, whatever else distributive justice requires, it requires ensuring that persons have a sufficient, not equal, capability to function as equals in society. This is because directly pursuing equality of capabilities above the sufficiency threshold has the paradoxical effect of rendering individuals vulnerable to being singled out as ‘less competent’ agents, thereby creating a ‘pathogenic vulnerability’ to social disrespect. This, however, is inconsistent with the expressive demands of equal respect for persons. Therefore, at least a certain degree of distributive inequality is not only compatible with but also required by a commitment to the ideal of relational equality.

This chapter explores two kinds of vulnerability which appear to cause a problem for neo-republicanism as a form of relational egalitarianism: the vulnerabilities involved in intimate and caring relationships, and those generated by complex economic and social processes like the global financial system. I argue that the standard neo-republican strategy of constraining arbitrary power can successfully account for the former; the value of the vulnerabilities involved in intimate relations depends on the presence of constraints which prevent power being exercised in ways which do not track relevant interests. But this approach is less successful in dealing with the latter kind of vulnerability, which generates cases in which agents can be subject to domination without suffering the loss of status, and accompanying inequality, usually characteristic of domination. I argue that while these cases count as exceptions to the standard relationship between non-domination and egalitarianism, neo-republicanism remains a form of relational egalitarianism.

Relational equality theorists have drawn attention to the expressive dimensions of social and institutional hierarchies, highlighting the ways that expressive disrespect, for example by state institutions and officials can entrench social inequalities. Meanwhile, theorists of trust have drawn attention to the ways that agents who are disadvantaged or marginalised are often treated with presumptive distrust by social institutions and excluded from the trust economy. This paper draws on these insights, on empirical findings from the literature in social psychology on procedural justice, and on conceptions of vulnerability, to argue that expressive disrespect and presumptive distrust by state institutions is a form of injustice that can entrench vulnerability. The theoretical argument is supported and extended by discussion of a notorious example from the recent Australian context, Robodebt, a government scheme that was found to be illegal, which used automated decision-making technology to identify and claw back alleged overpayments to social welfare recipients.

Although Thomas Hobbes is often portrayed as an egoistic and atomistic thinker, his political philosophy has a great deal to say about vulnerability and relational equality. This chapter draws out four insights from his political philosophy to apply to contemporary political philosophy. First, he outlines a compelling psychological theory that connects our ontological and social vulnerability. Second, he argues the best strategy for minimising our ontological and social vulnerability is to establish a society of equals, thus asserting a vital connection between vulnerability and relational equality. Third, he identifies some key powers that states must possess to establish and maintain equal relations among people and assuage our vulnerabilities. Fourth, he offers a unique justification for relational equality arguing that it is valuable not so much because it represents an authentic expression of our basic human equality as because it is instrumentally necessary to tamp down our anxieties and promote peace.

Paternalistic interference in an older person’s choices or actions appears to relegate the needs, values, and interests of that person as less valuable than the judgement of others about what is in the older person’s interests. For relational egalitarians, concerned to promote a society in which people stand in democratic relations of equality, paternalism prima facie undermines relational equality. This chapter draws on exploration of the sources of older people’s vulnerability and dependence on others for care, to better understand when and why paternalistic interference is objectionable. Objectionable paternalistic interference, on my view, occurs where it is either an effect of social relations of domination and oppression that prevent people from having their needs met without autonomy-undermining interference or it creates the conditions under which domination, exploitation, and oppression flourish, generating pathogenic vulnerabilities, including the risk of the person being denied the services they require to meet their needs.

This chapter explores the phenomenon of tipping points in both historical and contemporary societal change. It opens with compelling examples—from the abolition of slavery and Chinese foot binding to the collapse of the Pueblo civilizations—to illustrate how longstanding social norms and systems can abruptly vanish. The central idea is that these shifts often follow a gradual loss of resilience, making systems increasingly vulnerable to small disturbances. Once a critical threshold is crossed, change becomes self-reinforcing, propelling rapid transformations. This behavior, captured in mathematical terms as critical transitions, applies to diverse domains: climate systems, financial markets, individual mental health, and societies. The author introduces the concept of early-warning signals such as increased variability and slower recovery rates—known as critical slowing down—which precede tipping points. These insights are supported by archaeological evidence from the Pueblo people, whose repeated societal collapses were foreshadowed by such indicators.