Conditional Vulnerability Ethics (CoVE)

A Framework for Recognizing Context-Dependent Vulnerability

Contemporary ethical frameworks have advanced understanding of vulnerability through relational, layered, situational, and pathogenic accounts while emphasizing procedural safeguards for autonomy, beneficence, and justice. However, ethical analysis continues to focus primarily on vulnerable persons or situations rather than the contextual conditions under which autonomy is exercised. This paper introduces Conditional Vulnerability Ethics (CoVE), an ethical framework for evaluating how specific combinations of contextual conditions shape autonomy, agency, and the emergence of ethical vulnerability across human systems. CoVE does not introduce conditional vulnerability as a novel concept; rather, it synthesizes existing vulnerability scholarship into a distinct analytic and governance-oriented framework. The framework distinguishes formal consent from substantive autonomy, models ethical vulnerability as emerging through interactions among participant conditions, design features, and environmental contexts, and proposes that ethical oversight evaluate the contextual conditions under which autonomy is exercised rather than relying solely on procedural or categorical approaches. Applications across research, education, healthcare, institutional, longitudinal, and AI-mediated contexts demonstrate how evaluating contextual conditions can extend ethical oversight across diverse human systems while remaining compatible with existing vulnerability scholarship. By shifting ethical analysis from identifying vulnerable persons to evaluating vulnerable conditions, Conditional Vulnerability Ethics provides a methodology for evaluating the conditions under which ethical vulnerability emerges and becomes ethically consequential.