Risk and Responsibility

Date01 January 1999
AuthorAnthony Giddens
Published date01 January 1999
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.00188
THE
MODERN LAW REVIEW
Volume 62 No 1January 1999
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
ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 1999 (MLR 62:1, January). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 1
*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).

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