Background: People with intellectual disability are often defined as a vulnerable group. The feminist philosopher Jackie Scully argues that vulnerability is often associated with qualities such as immaturity, helplessness, victimhood, passivity and so forth. As research is a social activity, the qualities associated with vulnerability affect researchers' decisions about who to include and exclude from their research project as well as influencing their interpretations of the research participants' answers, behaviour and actions. This may result in excluding people with intellectual disability from research or that their ways of being becomes interpreted as mere symptoms of their diagnosis rather than subjective opinions and experiences. Conclusion: By addressing these issues through the work of Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim, this paper contests traditional interpretations of vulnerability and instead argues that vulnerability should be related more specifically to each individual research project and prompt questions such as: How do we protect these particular participants from harm?