Susceptibility: a new meaning for vulnerability

Abstract

This study analyzes the importance of vulnerability concept in bioethics and its scope related to autonomy of the subject. It inserts the issue in contemporary socio-cultural context, where difficulty to dialogue with vulnerability predominates. It assumes the presence of vulnerability in every human process as substantive to Men, recurring still to current texts to set its anthropological meaning in reflections related to the research. It supports that awareness of vulnerability is important to feed critical reasoning by pointing as needed that vulnerability be thought dialectically as another arm of
autonomy, while capacity for decision and protection. It sets aging process, transversal to human being, by establishing the difference between vulnerable and susceptible, admitting an innovative approach to clinical practice.