In recent years, vulnerability has acquired an increasingly relevant political-moral significance. Its renewed interest is due to the idea that if you focus the attention on what constitutes the ideal capable of making people's lives truly "human", a theme like the one of vulnerability represents more an obstacle to be removed in respect to a condition of perfection than a normative resource. This does not mean that you cannot approach an ethic of vulnerability without caution and some reservations. Summarising: the category of vulnerability can be used as a strategic resource of critical value able to foster transformation of the unjust social situation, or is it inevitably associated with a relationship of domination and subordination, or even of violence? The thesis of the present paper is that it is twofold. However, if included in the conceptual framework of the theory of recognition, vulnerability is not necessarily a limiting condition; rather it is an ontological feature that can help recover the intrinsic social dimension typical of the human condition.
