Very often in the social sciences, we try to define vulnerability from our own moral standpoint, while forgetting that this standpoint also produces a biased observation. We begin with good intentions: we want to identify suffering, inequality, exclusion, dependency, or disadvantage. We want to make visible those who are ignored by dominant institutions and social structures. However, precisely because this intention appears morally justified, we sometimes fail to ask whether our observation of vulnerability is itself sufficiently examined. More importantly, when we observe vulnerability only from our own point of view, we can easily fall into a condescending way of dealing with the very people we want to protect.

We may believe that we are helping, including, empowering, or modernising them, while in fact we are imposing our own criteria of what a good life should look like. This does not happen because our intentions are bad. It happens because our observation is not neutral. It is shaped by our own expectations, privileges, habits, technologies, and institutional assumptions.

A simple example may illustrate this. I can imagine giving my grandfather a tablet so that he can watch movies, communicate more easily, and become more digitally included. From my point of view, this seems like a positive intervention. Older people are often digitally excluded; digital technologies can provide access to entertainment, information, services, and communication, and therefore digital inclusion appears almost automatically desirable. I give him the tablet because I assume that it will improve his life.

But he takes the tablet, puts it on the closet, and never touches it again.

From my perspective, this may initially appear as a failure of digital inclusion. I could interpret it as lack of interest, lack of digital skills, resistance to change, or even vulnerability. But from his perspective, the situation may look completely different. He may not need the tablet to live a good life. He may already have his own routines, relations, forms of knowledge, and ways of navigating the world. What appears to me as exclusion may appear to him as irrelevance. What I see as a solution may not correspond to any problem that he experiences.

This is a very simple, almost plastic example, but it reveals something important about how we sometimes approach vulnerability and so-called vulnerable groups. We often assume that we already know where the problem is. We observe from a position of institutional, academic, technological, or generational privilege and then define others through the absence of what we consider necessary. They do not have access. They do not participate. They do not use the right tools. They do not speak the right language. They are not sufficiently mobile, visible, connected, informed, autonomous, or included.

But social life is more complex than that. Groups and individuals often develop their own ways of responding to the conditions in which they live. They produce routines, networks, practical knowledge, cultural forms, solidarities, and strategies of continuation. In other words, they may develop resilience in relation to the very problems through which we define them as vulnerable.

This does not mean that resilience is always good. It should not be romanticised. Sometimes resilience can mean adaptation to injustice. Sometimes it can mean surviving in conditions that should not exist. Sometimes it can take the form of withdrawal, distrust, polarisation, or ghettoisation. A community may become resilient by closing itself off from wider society. A group may protect itself by rejecting external institutions. Individuals may develop strategies that allow them to continue, but only by narrowing their world and reducing their possibilities.

Therefore, the point is not to replace vulnerability with resilience, as if resilience were simply the positive opposite of vulnerability. The point is to understand that vulnerability and resilience are often produced within the same ecology. The same conditions that expose people to risk may also generate specific forms of adaptation. The same environment that limits participation may also produce alternative forms of belonging. The same exclusion that weakens institutional access may strengthen internal solidarity. This is why we must be careful before we define someone’s situation only through lack.

In this sense, vulnerability is not primarily about a vulnerable person. It is about an ecology that produces certain effects for certain individuals or groups. Vulnerability emerges within relations between people, institutions, technologies, expectations, material conditions, classifications, and possibilities of response. A person is not vulnerable in isolation. A person becomes vulnerable when the surrounding ecology makes their participation, continuation, recognition, or response fragile.

This also changes the central sociological question. We should not begin by asking: Who is vulnerable by essence? We should ask: Under which conditions do vulnerability become possible? What kind of institutional expectations make someone appear incapable? What kind of technological transformation makes someone excluded? What kind of social norm makes someone dependent, invisible, or deficient? What kind of observer defines this condition as vulnerability? And what forms of resilience already exist within the lifeworld of those we observe? The other side of the phenomenon is that vulnerability is not produced only by exclusion. It can also be produced by inclusion itself.

The digital sphere is a good example of it. We often assume that digital inclusion is automatically positive: if people have access to digital technologies, if they know how to use them, and if they participate online, then they are less vulnerable. But this is only partly true. Digital inclusion can open possibilities, but it can also expose people to new risks: internet fraud, identity theft, revenge pornography, online bullying, manipulation, misinformation, and different forms of digital humiliation.

This is why it is not enough to say that someone is digitally included or digitally literate. A young person can be highly digitally active and still deeply vulnerable – e.g., online bullying, revenge pornography... An older person can learn how to use digital services and still be exposed to fraud or institutional confusion. Therefore, digital vulnerability should not be understood as the opposite of digital inclusion. It is not simply a problem of those who are outside the digital world. It can also be a problem of those who are inside it but without enough protection, orientation, support, or social resilience. This is where social wellbeing becomes important. What we sometimes forget is that the digital sphere is not a separate virtual reality detached from everyday life. It is part of our real social world. If someone is humiliated online, that humiliation happens in their lifeworld. If someone is excluded from a digital service, that exclusion affects their real access to institutions. If someone is manipulated, bullied, or exploited through digital media, the consequences are not virtual.

For that reason, (digital) vulnerability needs to be understood through the relation between (digital) participation and social wellbeing. The question is whether certain aspects of inclusion, but also exclusion (e.g., digital or any other), support or weaken social integration, social acceptance, social contribution, social actualisation, and social coherence. These dimensions, as Keyes argues (1998), are central for understanding social wellbeing. Only with this reflection can we start examining the vulnerability of a group or certain individuals.

So, what we aimed to do here was not to offer a final definition of vulnerability, but to show why vulnerability is a more complex concept than it often appears. Vulnerability cannot be understood only as a personal characteristic, nor only as a label attached to specific groups. It emerges through relations between social practices and forms of resilience, dimensions of social wellbeing, and processes of both social exclusion and social inclusion. In that sense, vulnerability is a complex social and communicative phenomenon. It needs to be addressed through sociology as a science of society, not only through moral concern or institutional classification.

Therefore, a grounded sociological approach can help us understand not how we would like vulnerability to appear but how it operates in the everyday lives of those we want to understand and support. Only then can our interventions become more precise, more reflexive, and, after all, helpful for the policymaking. Instead of beginning with the assumption that we already know who is vulnerable and what they need, we should begin by asking how vulnerability is produced, how resilience is formed, and how inclusion, exclusion, and social wellbeing shape people’s real possibilities for participation in society.