106 Theory,Culture Society manageable minor risks,but legalizes the mega-hazards by virtue of its authority,to the extent they cannot be minimized technically, and burdens everyone with them,including those who resist? How can a democratic political authority be maintained which must counter the escalating consciousness of hazards with energetic safety claims,but in that very process puts itself constantly on the defensive and risks its entire credibility with every accident or sign of an accident? The Role of Technology and the Natural Sciences in the Risk Society There is a public dispute over a new ethics of research in order to avoid incalculable and inhuman results.To limit oneself to that debate is to misunderstand the degree and type of involvement of the engineering sciences in the production of hazards.An ethical renewal of the sciences,even if it were not to become entangled in the thicket of ethical viewpoints,would be like a bicycle brake on an intercontinental jet,considering the autonomization of tech- nological development and its interconnections with economic interests.Moreover,we are not concerned merely with the ethics of research,but also with its logic and with the unity of culprits and judges (experts)of the engineering sciences in the technocracy of hazards. An initial insight is central:in matters of hazards,no one is an expert-particularly not the experts.Predictions of risk contain a double fuzziness.First,they presume cultural acceptance and cannot produce it.There is no scientific bridge between destruction and protest or between destruction and acceptance.Acceptable risks are ultimately accepted risks.Second,new knowledge can turn normality into hazards overnight.Nuclear energy and the hole in the ozone layer are prominent examples.Therefore:the advancement of science refutes its original claims of safety.It is the successes of science which sow the doubts as to its risk predictions. But conversely,it is also true that acute danger passes the mono- poly of interpretation to those who caused it,of all people.In the shock of the catastrophe,people speak of rem,Becquerels or ethylene glycol as if they know what such words mean and they must do so in order to find their way in the most everyday matters.This contradiction must be exposed:on the one hand the engineering sciences involuntarily enact their own self-refutation in their con- tradictory risk diagnoses.On the other,they continue to administer Downloaded from lcs.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on June 17,2012Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on June 17, 2012