Vulnerability and Human Dignity

DOI: 10.15343/0104-7809.200630.3.7

Abstract

The concept of vulnerability was incorporated to bioethical debates in the last few years, more specifically in the decade of
1990. The scare provoked by the broad growth of the epidemic caused by HIV/AIDS among populations social and economically less
favored seems to have been a basic fact for the consolidation of this concept in bioethics. Historically, it was presumed that the
vulnerable ones were people affected by physical and mental deficiencies, children, senile people and institutionalized people of every
kind, but people had been left out that are in vulnerability situations, as it is the case of underdeveloped populations, people under social
vulnerability, due to oppression and poverty contexts. The author emphasizes the most important elements from some national and
international documents referring to ethics and bioethics in the cares for vulnerable people. He concludes that science and ethics need
to mutually illuminate themselves to protect the human being, this singular universe that capture in its genes the history of humankind.