SCIENCE AND RISK: SCIENTIFIC AUTHORITY AT RISK

摘要

Fear is a useful instinct, which warns about potential dangers. As regards scientific developments, these dangers are not imaginary but have already been largely confirmed by history. Through a combination of self-restraint and political regulation, humankind has till now lived with them. No nuclear bomb has been exploded in anger since 1945, even though Chernobyl and the management of nuclear wastes cannot be dismissed as small problems. In the new world, however, such analogies may not hold. After the successive reigns of chemistry and physics in the past century, the dominant scientific fields are now biology and computer sciences. In both, a market logic is at work, while technologies depend on nothing more than the manipulation of weightless information. In these circumstances, control mechanisms that have worked in the past may no longer be effective. According to Beck, "what people fear the reality of is real in its consequences". While in the previous period, the development of science remained largely unquestioned and scientists took their autonomy for granted as their due, they are now under increasing scrutiny. Whatever future continuities and ruptures there may be in the social construction of risk, this evolution seems largely irreversible, since a society which would deprive itself of socially accepted instances of assessment of knowledge would be seriously endangered. Even though there is no general agreement on underlying principles, new rules and institutions are badly required, to regulate scientific practice and expertise socially and to render reasonably safe further developments of science. In this process, scientists have a determinant role to play, both to maintain the ethics of science and to ensure that structures encompassing the global reality of risks will prevent rather than reinforce the arbitrary. The future of our societies requires not only that politics integrates the cognitive dimension, but also that science integrates the democratic dimension, since democracy is not just a social philosophy or an ethical position but is - and will increasingly have to be - an ally of intelligence.