This life, or the lives of others? Rethinking mortality as vulnerability

The condition of mortality is conventionally understood as the possession of a finite lifetime. As lifetimes have lengthened, and ageing and dying have become more protracted, a more open awareness of mortality has emerged. The de-tabooing of death has increased the pertinence of the existential injunction to authenticate ‘this life’, but arguably it is also accompanied by more casual attitudes to the deaths of others, as reflected in the popularity of dark tourism, the viral spread of images of military and terrorist killings, and the view, shared by advocates of assisted dying, that some lives would be better brought to a faster end. In this article I argue that a more truthful understanding of the human condition of mortality would conceptualise it not as finitude but as vulnerability. When we think of mortality as a limit of time, death becomes another component of life to be consumed or mastered before time runs out. Rethinking mortality as vulnerability, on the other hand, reminds us that dependency and suffering are conditions of caring about the world, and of finding meaning in lives other than, and after, our own.