Overview

Whereas standard approaches to risk and vulnerability presuppose a strict separation between humans and their world, this book develops an existential-phenomenological approach according to which we are always already beings-at-risk. Moreover, it is argued that in our struggle against vulnerability, we create new vulnerabilities and thereby transform ourselves as much as we transform the world. Responding to the discussion about human enhancement and information technologies, the book then shows that this dynamic-relational approach has important implications for the evaluation of new technologies and their risks. It calls for a normative anthropology of vulnerability that does not ask which objective risks are acceptable, how we can become invulnerable, or which technologies threaten human nature, but which vulnerability transformations we want. To the extent that we can steer the growth of new technologies at all, this tragic and sometimes comic project should therefore beguided by what we want to become.​

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9789400760240

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From the reviews: The book offers a complex and ambitious programme to establish a normative anthropology of vulnerability ... . Coeckelbergh has written an important and original book, with a carefully constructed argument. He provides a rich discussion of fundamental and topical issues from a wide range of perspectives. ... The book is valuable for scholars in many fields, not only philosophy of technology, anthropology or ethics, but also other disciplines dealing with technology and regulation of technology. (Bert-Jaap Koops, Law, Innovation and Technology, Vol. 5 (2), 2013)

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