Conditional Vulnerability Ethics

‍ A Framework for Ethical Vulnerability

Conditional Vulnerability Ethics (CoVE) is an ethical framework for examining how contextual conditions shape vulnerability, autonomy, and agency across human systems. Rather than treating vulnerability primarily as a characteristic of particular individuals or groups, CoVE directs ethical attention toward the conditions under which vulnerability may arise.

Drawing upon scholarship on vulnerability, autonomy, and research ethics, CoVE develops a conditions-based account of ethical vulnerability that examines how interacting contextual factors may alter a person's capacity to exercise meaningful autonomy. The framework contributes to broader questions concerning how vulnerability should be understood and evaluated when the conditions surrounding human decision-making are dynamic rather than fixed.

Manuscript under review.