The social model of disability offers powerful tools to conceptualise and deal with the exclusion of persons with disabilities, but only the attention to both individual condition and social barriers is able to set apart the violations of human rights of persons with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities. The paper claims that the analysis of vulnerability from the perspective of the theory of oppression, in line with the British social model of disability, remains adequate only providing it includes the importance of the individual dimension of disability and it incorporates the representation of human condition that descends from a contemporary conception of rights as a result of the revision of the project of modernity from critical theory perspective.