Материал: Giddens, Anthony - On Risk And Responsibility

THE

MODERN LAW REVIEW

Risk and Responsibility

Anthony Giddens*

I have to begin with a qualification. I am not a lawyer, and my knowledge of legal theory is at best strictly limited. So I cannot guarantee that what I have to say will even interest most of my audience, let alone prove instructive. Much of what I want to talk about concerns risk, which so far as I know does not figure prominently in legal writing. I shall say less about responsibility, which is much closer to the usual concerns of the law. I shall attempt to show, however, that the ideas of risk and responsibility are in fact closely linked.

Let me begin by posing a question. What do the following have in common: BSE; the troubles at Lloyds; the Nick Leeson affair; global warming; drinking red wine; declining sperm counts? All reflect a vast swathe of change affecting our lives today. Much of this change is bound up with the impact of science and technology on our everyday activities and on the material environment. The modern world, of course, has long been shaped by the influence of science and scientific discovery. As the pace of innovation hots up, however, new technologies penetrate more and more to the core of our lives; and more and more of what we feel and experience comes under the scientific spotlight.

The situation does not lead to increasing certainty about, or security in, the world

± in some ways the opposite is true. As Karl Popper above all has shown, science does not produce proof and can never do more than approximate to truth. The founders of modern science believed it would produce knowledge built on firm foundations. Popper supposes by contrast that science is built on shifting sands. The first principle of scientific advance is that even one's most cherished theories and beliefs are always open to revision. Science is thus an inherently sceptical endeavour, involving a process of that constant revision of claims to knowledge.

The sceptical, mutable nature of science was for a long time insulated from the wider public domain ± an insulation which persisted so long as science and technology were relatively restricted in their effects on everyday life. Today, we are all in regular and routine contact with these traits of scientific innovation. The consequences for health of drinking red wine, for example, were once seen by researchers as basically harmful. More recent research indicates that, taken in

* London School of Economics and Political Science.

This is the text of the twenty-sixth Chorley Lecture, delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 27 May 1998. The article draws upon material from `Risk Society: the Context of British Politics' in J. Franklin (ed), The Politics of Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).

moderation, the health benefits of red wine outweigh the drawbacks. What will tomorrow's research show? Will it perhaps reveal that red wine is toxic after all?

We don't, and we can't, know ± yet all of us, as consumers, have to respond in some way or another to this unstable and complex framework of scientific claims and counterclaims. Living in the UK, should one eat beef? Who can say? The health risk appears to be slight. Yet there is at least the possibility of an outbreak of BSE-related disease five, ten or twenty years from now among the human population.

We don't and can't know ± the same applies to a diversity of new risk situations. Take, for instance, declining sperm counts. Some scientific studies make authoritative claims about increasing male infertility, and trace this to the action of environmental toxins. Other scientists, however, dispute the very existence of the phenomenon, let alone the explanations offered to account for it. Global warming is accepted as real by the majority of specialists in the area. Yet there is no shortage of experts who either deny that global warming exists or regard it as produced by long-term climatic fluctuations rather than by the greenhouse effect.

The Lloyds insurance market seems for the moment to have got over the disastrous financial troubles which have plagued it over the last few years. Such troubles were popularly portrayed as being bound up with class ± with the complacent outlook of the `names' and their brokers. In fact, they had their basic origin in the changing character of risk. Lloyds was hit by, among other things, findings about the toxic nature of asbestos and by a series of natural disasters ± which were possibly not `natural' at all, but influenced by global climatic change. The number of typhoons, hurricanes and other climatic disturbances happening in the world each year has climbed over the past fifteen years or so. With its massive future commitments, Lloyds ± in common with other lesser insurance institutions ± could be financially crippled at any time by as yet quite unforeseen negative consequences of new scientific findings or technological changes.

Simon Sebag Montefiore has written an interesting account of the adventures of Nick Leeson and Barings Bank. Sebag Montefiore suggests that there are two different ways in which what happened at Barings can be interpreted (much like the events at Lloyds). On the one hand, there is a class plus corruption explanation. According to this view, Barings Bank collapsed because it had a crusty, upper-class management at odds with the demands of a dynamic global economic order.

Sebag Montefiore casts doubt on this explanation. He argues that people working at the outer edges of the financial system, particularly in futures markets ± complex markets where deals can be struck over movements in prices which have not yet, and may never, happen ± are like astronauts. They have stepped outside the realm of bankers and financial experts ± and they have stepped outside without a lifeline. Nick Leeson drifted away much too far from any solid ground, but most others are able to keep themselves attached to their space capsule.

Sebag Montefiore has a very arresting phrase to describe this situation. He says Nick Leeson and other people like him `operate at the outer edge of the ordered world, on the barbaric final frontier of modern technology'. In other words, they are involved with systems which even they themselves do not understand, so dramatic is the onrush of change in the new electronic global economy. I think this is right, but the argument can be further generalised. It is not just people like Nick Leeson, not just the new financial entrepreneurs, who live at the barbaric outer edge of modern technology. All of us now do ± and I would take this to be the

defining characteristic of what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. A risk society is a society where we increasingly live on a high technological frontier which absolutely no one completely understands and which generates a diversity of possible futures. The origins of risk society can be traced to two fundamental transformations which are affecting our lives today. Each is connected to the increasing influence of science and technology, although not wholly determined by them. The first transformation can be called the end of nature; and the second the end of tradition.

The end of nature does not mean a world in which the natural environment disappears. It means that there are now few if any aspects of the physical world untouched by human intervention. The end of nature is relatively recent. It isn't something, of course, which can be precisely dated, but we can nevertheless roughly plot when the end of nature happened. It happened when a transition came about from the sort of anxieties people used to have about nature to a new set of worries. For hundreds of years, people worried about what nature could do to us ± earthquakes, floods, plagues, bad harvests and so on. At a certain point, somewhere over the past fifty years or so, we stopped worrying so much about what nature could do to us, and we started worrying more about what we have done to nature. The transition makes one major point of entry in risk society. It is a society which lives `after nature'.

However, it is also a society which lives after tradition. To live after the end of tradition is essentially to be in a world where life is no longer lived as fate. For many people ± and this is still a source of class division in modern societies ± diverse aspects of life were established by tradition as fate. It was the fate of a woman to be involved in a domestic milieu for much of her life, to have children and look after the house. It was the fate of men to go out to work, to work until they retired and then ± quite often soon after retirement ± essentially to fade away. We no longer live our lives as fate, in a process which Ulrich Beck calls individualisation. A society which lives after nature and after tradition is really very different from the earlier form of industrial society ± the basis for the development of the core intellectual traditions of Western culture.

To analyse what risk society is, one must make a series of distinctions. First of all, we must separate risk from hazard or danger. Risk is not, as such, the same as hazard or danger. A risk society is not intrinsically more dangerous or hazardous than pre-existing forms of social order. It is instructive in this context to trace out the origins of the term `risk'. Life in the Middle Ages was hazardous; but there was no notion of risk and there doesn't seem in fact to be a notion of risk in any traditional culture. The reason for this is that dangers are experienced as given. Either they come from God, or they come simply from a world which one takes for granted. The idea of risk is bound up with the aspiration to control and particularly with the idea of controlling the future.

The observation is important. The idea of `risk society' might suggest a world which has become more hazardous, but this is not necessarily so. Rather, it is a society increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), which generates the notion of risk. The idea of risk, interestingly, was first used by Western explorers when they ventured into new waters in their travels across the world. From exploring geographical space, it came to be transferred to the exploration of time. The word refers to a world which we are both exploring and seeking to normalise and control. Essentially, `risk' always has a negative connotation, since it refers to the chance of avoiding an unwanted outcome. But it can quite often be seen in a positive light, in terms of the taking of bold initiatives

in the face of a problematic future. Successful risk-takers, whether in exploration, in business or in mountaineering, are widely admired.

We should distinguish risk from hazard, but we must also make a distinction between two kinds of risk. The first two hundred years of the existence of industrial society were dominated by what one might call external risk. External risk, expressed in down-to-earth terms, is risk of events that may strike individuals unexpectedly (from the outside, as it were) but that happen regularly enough and often enough in a whole population of people to be broadly predictable, and so insurable. There are two kinds of insurance associated with the rise of industrial society: the private insurance company, and public insurance, which is the predominant concern of the welfare state.

The welfare state became the left's project in the post-1945 period ± it became seen above all as a means of achieving social justice and income redistribution. By and large, however, it did not originate as such. It developed as a security state, a way of protecting against risk, where collective rather than private insurance was necessary. Like early forms of private insurance, it was built on the presumption of external risk. External risk can be fairly well calculated ± one can draw up actuarial tables and decide on that basis how to insure people. Sickness, disablement, unemployment were treated by the welfare state as `accidents of fate', against which insurance should be collectively provided.

A world which lives after nature and after the end of tradition is one marked by a transition from external to what I call manufactured risk. Manufactured risk is risk created by the very progression of human development, especially by the progression of science and technology. Manufactured risk refers to new risk environments for which history provides us with very little previous experience. We often don't really know what the risks are, let alone how to calculate them accurately in terms of probability tables.

Manufactured risk is expanding in most dimensions of human life. It is associated with a side of science and technology which the early theorists of industrial society by and large did not foresee. Science and technology create as many uncertainties as they dispel ± and these uncertainties cannot be `solved' in any simple way by yet further scientific advance. Manufactured uncertainty intrudes directly into personal and social life ± it isn't confined to more collective settings of risk. In a world where one can no longer simply rely on tradition to establish what to do in a given range of contexts, people have to take a more active and risk-infused orientation to their relationships and involvements.

The rise of risk society has several interesting consequences ± which should concern anyone who has taken an interest in the BSE debate in Britain and continental Europe, or in fact in any of the episodes I mentioned at the beginning of this discussion.

As manufactured risk expands ± or, if you like, as we live more and more in a risk society in Ulrich Beck's terms ± there is a new riskiness to risk. In a social order in which new technologies are chronically affecting our lives, and an almost endless revision of taken-for-granted ways of doing things ensues, the future becomes ever more absorbing, but at the same time opaque. There are few direct lines to it, only a plurality of `future scenarios'.

We recently saw the tenth anniversary of the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl plant. No one knows whether it is hundreds ± or millions ± of people who have been affected by the Chernobyl fall-out. The long-term effects will in any case be difficult to chart, because if they exist they are likely to be diffuse. We are altering the environment, and the patterns of life we follow, almost constantly. Even many

apparently benign habits or innovations could turn sour ± just as, conversely, risk can often be overestimated. Take the example of smoking. Smoking was encouraged by doctors up to some thirty or so years ago as a means of relaxation. No one knew the time bomb which the practice of smoking was stirring up. The BSE episode might have an opposite outcome. Perhaps it will turn out that humans are not affected. It is characteristic of the new types of risk that it is even disputed whether they exist at all.

In risk society there is a new moral climate of politics, one marked by a push- and-pull between accusations of scaremongering on the one hand and of cover-ups on the other. A good deal of political decision-making is now about managing risks

± risks which do not originate in the political sphere, yet have to be politically managed. If anyone ± government official, scientific expert or lay person ± takes any given risk seriously, he or she must proclaim it. It must be widely publicised because people must be persuaded that the risk is real ± a fuss must be made about it. However, if a fuss is indeed created and the risk turns out to be minimal, those involved will be accused of scaremongering.

Suppose on the other hand that the authorities decide that the risk is not very great, as the British government did in the case of BSE. In this case, the government says: we've got the backing of scientists here; there isn't much risk, we can go on as we did before. Yet if things turn out otherwise, then of course they will be accused of a cover-up.

Paradoxically, scaremongering may be necessary to reduce risks we face ± yet if it is `successful' in this sense, it appears as just that, scaremongering. The case of AIDS is an example. Suppose governments and experts make great public play with the risks associated with unsafe sex, to get people to change their sexual behaviour, and AIDS does not spread nearly as much as originally predicted. The response is likely to be: why were you scaring everyone like that? This sort of political dilemma becomes routine in risk society, but there is no easily available way of confronting it. For as I mentioned earlier, even whether there are any risks at all is likely to be controversial. We just cannot know beforehand when we are actually `scaremongering' and when we are not.

The emergence of a risk society is not wholly about the avoidance of hazards, for reasons also given previously. Risk society, looked at positively, is one in which there is an expansion of choice. Now obviously choice is differentially distributed according to class and income. As nature and tradition release their hold, for instance, some otherwise infertile women can pay to have children through the use of new reproductive technologies, whereas others cannot. We know that in detraditionalised social settings some women live in poverty after divorce, whereas others achieve a more rewarding life than they could have done before. Technological innovation usually expands the domain of choice; as does the disappearance of tradition. As customary ways of doing things become problematic, people must choose in many areas which used to be governed by taken-for-granted norms. Eating is an example: there are no traditional diets any more.

The advent of risk society has strong implications for rethinking the political agenda in this country and elsewhere. The emergence of manufactured risk presumes a new politics because it presumes a reorientation of values and the strategies relevant to pursuing them. There is no risk which can even be described without reference to a value. That value may be simply the preservation of human life, although it is usually more complex. When there is a clash of the different types of risk, there is a clash of values and a directly political set of questions.