In the contemporary linguistic landscape, certain words acquire a particular resonance, becoming charged with emotional and political meanings that, with indiscriminate and careless use, can dilute their conceptual precision. Vulnerability is one of them.
Originally, a technical term from Latin vulnerable (“that can be hurt”), has transcended its initial niche—in areas such as computer security, engineering or ecology—to settle into everyday, psychological and social discourse. And especially in the field of law. The term vulnerability has become so popular in academic, political, and social discourses that we find it every day in the media.
However, this extended use is not always correct and, in many cases, it is imprecise, confusing, problematic and self-serving. On this path to popularization, it has suffered a fundamental distortion: it has become an abstract and absolute noun, stripped of its vital preposition “a”, and has been dangerously confused with concepts such as weakness or fragility. This misuse is not a mere semantic error; It constitutes a simplification that impoverishes and trivializes our understanding of the human condition and can lead, is leading, to paternalistic, charitable social and cooperation policies or to a static vision of people and their situations.
The first and most serious deviation is the transformation of vulnerability into an ontological state, into an intrinsic and general quality. We talk about “vulnerable groups” or even “a condition of vulnerability” as if it were an essential, inherent, permanent and general quality. This absolutization omits the relational and situational structure of the term.
In its precise sense, one is vulnerable “to” something: to a cyber attack, to illness, to discrimination based on race or gender, to illness, to an environment, to an unjust economic structure, to a form of violence or to institutional exclusion. Vulnerability is always a dialectical relationship between a subject (individual or collective), a specific context and a potential threat. Strictly speaking, no one is vulnerable in the abstract. Vulnerability is not an absolute trait or a universal label, but rather a specific relationship in the face of a specific threat.
Vulnerability always implies exposure to a specific danger and a limited ability to cope with it. Therefore, stating that someone “is vulnerable” without specifying what it is, is equivalent to emptying the term of analytical content and turning it into an ambiguous category. An executive of a multinational company may be extremely vulnerable to a stock market crash, but not to a drought that affects their access to drinking water; a subsistence farmer can be, but not to the volatility of the financial markets; The King of Spain may be enormously vulnerable to , but he does not appear to be vulnerable to drought or changes in the markets. Reducing vulnerability to a generalized adjective makes the power structures and the systems that produce them invisible, personalizing and pathologizing what is, to a large extent, a political and social phenomenon.
Labeling people or groups as “vulnerable” without contextualization contributes to naturalizing inequality, as if it were inherent to those who suffer from it and not the result of power relations, deficient public policies or exclusive economic systems. And it contributes to stigmatizing these groups
This absolutization leads directly to the second misunderstanding: the equation of vulnerability with weakness or fragility. Weakness suggests a lack of strength, an inability. Fragility refers to a delicate constitution, prone to breaking. Both imply a lack, a deficit inherent to the subject. As the philosopher pointed out, vulnerability is a relational condition that emerges from human interdependence and social structures, not from an individual failure.
A person can be autonomous, strong and competent, and still be vulnerable to certain threats in certain circumstances. Confusing vulnerability with personal inferiority reduces the phenomenon to an individual characteristic and hides the social conditions that produce it. This confusion is not innocent. Labeling people or groups as “vulnerable” without contextualization contributes to naturalizing inequality, as if it were inherent to those who suffer from it and not the result of power relations, deficient public policies or exclusive economic systems. And it contributes to stigmatizing these groups.
On the other hand, the social distribution of vulnerability—who is exposed to what threats and with what resources to confront them—is deeply unequal and that is where injustice lies. The feminist thinker, with her theory of “universal vulnerability,” argues precisely that, by recognizing that we are all vulnerable subjects, the State should focus on creating “resilient institutions” that mitigate disadvantages, instead of labeling certain groups as intrinsically fragile.
The language of vulnerability, misused, can reinforce paternalism and strip subjects of agency, presenting them only as passive recipients of protection, without the capacity to confront threats.
Confusing vulnerability with weakness leads to a compassionate but condescending discourse, which sees “vulnerable” people or groups as passive objects, deserving of pity or help, instead of agents with resilience, capabilities and rights. The language of vulnerability, misused, can reinforce paternalism and strip subjects of agency, presenting them only as passive recipients of protection, without the capacity to confront threats.
The consequences of this terminological confusion are tangible. In the field of public policies, designating a group as “vulnerable” without specifying what, can lead to generic and welfare interventions that do not attack the systemic roots of their exposure to harm. We are seeing it in numerous countries, including Spain. The sociologist criticizes how the language of vulnerability can serve to “depoliticize” poverty, transforming a question of economic justice and redistribution into a mere problem of managing marginal populations.
In popular psychology, the exhortation to “show vulnerability”—popularized by authors such as , who associates it with courage, authenticity, and connection—although valuable, runs the risk of being trivialized if its contextual dimension is forgotten. Brown emphasizes that vulnerability requires boundaries and trust; It is not an indiscriminate exposure. Revealing one’s own wounds is only safe in contexts of respect; Otherwise, it may increase exposure to further attacks. You are not invited to be “vulnerable” in the abstract, without considering that vulnerability is always to someone or something.
Recovering the precision of the term is, therefore, an act of ethical and political rigor. It implies, first of all, reinstating the preposition “a”: we must always ask ourselves “vulnerable, to what?”, and “under what conditions?”. Secondly, it requires detaching it from the strength/weakness dichotomy. Vulnerability is not the opposite of resilience; In fact, it is your budget. Only because we are vulnerable can we be resilient. Resilience is the ability to respond, adapt and recover from the threats to which we are vulnerable, as studied by sustainability sciences and community psychology.
In conclusion, the misuse of the term “vulnerability” by converting it into an absolute state and confusing it with weakness is not a mere linguistic inaccuracy. It is a symptom of blurred thinking that, by decontextualizing exposure to threat and harm, ends up naturalizing inequalities and stripping people of their agency.
Vulnerability, properly understood, does not weaken us; reveals to us the fundamental fabric of our interdependence and the collective responsibility of weaving networks that protect, without canceling, that shared condition
Recognizing that vulnerability is relational, situational and universally human, but unequally distributed, forces us to a finer analysis of social structures. It leads us to a solidarity based not on pity for the “weak” or “vulnerable”, but on justice and the commitment to transform those conditions that unfairly and avoidably expose some more than others to suffer harm.
Vulnerability, properly understood, does not weaken us; It reveals to us the fundamental fabric of our interdependence and the collective responsibility of weaving networks that protect, without canceling, that shared condition. Recognizing that vulnerability is always contextualized, situated, relational and specific, and that it does not equate to weakness or fragility, is essential to avoid stigmatization and to more accurately understand the dynamics of risk and inequality. Recovering the rigor of the concept implies stopping using it as a general label and assuming it as an analytical tool that reveals not who “are” vulnerable, but to what and why they are vulnerable.
