On Social Risk

As a universal phenomenon, the social risk goes together with human existence. When human beings perform their practices, they inevitably encounter with various risks. For the risk finds its necessicity implied in the social development and its real ground rooted in the existence. The social-historical from the primitive society to the future information society, by way of the agricultural society and industrial society, saw various modes of risk being determined by the different situations of human existence. Accordingly, the diverse levels of the cognitions of risks and the different responses to risks are not only the reflections of the human beins'relation to the nature and their society, but also the expression of the degree to which human beings realize their essential powers.As the essential characteristic of risk, uncertainty appears everywhere within all domains of social life, whereas the creation of human history is a process of seeking for certainty in a uncertain world by means of the finite reason. The risk is concerned with the given subject's own values and interests, for the different subject have their distinct risk preference. In the context of globalization the social risk is so diffusible that the risk could fastly traverse wide geographic space and result in global disasters. On the other hand, the risk opens up the possible spheres. Essentially, risk is formed in human beings'actions of knowing and going into the world; the sensuous activities are the foundation of the social risk; the model of production and its changes are the resource of the risks; social conflicts and differentiations are the motivity causing the social risks. Therefore the social risks are the results from human existence, and show forth the paradoxis in existence as the undermentioned contradictions: the humanization of the nature vs. the process of human beings'changing into the nature; the objectification vs. non-objectification; the infinite vs the finite;"to be"vs."ought to be".The problem of the social risk is among those of modernity. The modernity dominated by Enlightenment reason resulted in difficulties as well as the great progress, that is to say, the risks of modernity in fact are the consequences of modernity. During the emerging of modernity, the risks forms ceaselessly and stands out as a basic characteristic and a principal problem proper to modernity. Among those risks, the crises of Lebenswelt are rooted in the separating and misusing of reason and could lead to the self-destroying of reason. Ecologic risks, scientific-technical risks and economic crises are all the directly external appearances of the risks of modernity. The coming of risk society comes from the self-encountering, self-disputing and self-counteracting of the modernity. Modern structures of society maintain its stableness and safety by way of the system-regulating mechanism, but the tendencies to rupture implied in the structures make the social life involved into crises. The realization of modernity depends on the integrating and ordering of social life by institutions, but the institutions proper to modernity themselves have reflexivity, which means that to live in the risk society is to live in the negative effects produced by the institutions of modernity. Generally, the coming of risk society shows both that modernity could not eliminate crises imposed by itself and that modernity could go towards the posmodernity. The conception of the risk society aims at dispelling the modernity as to construct a new formation of society, but inspecting and providing normative bases for modernity in the spirit of the positively reflective critique within the modernity, so as to reconstruct the harmonious co-existence relationship between human beings and the nature and society.The risk management is an active response to modern risk society. In theory, the concept of responsibility should be introduced as a new dimension into the modern ethics, in order to break the limits of the traditional theory and underline the responsibility for the future. On the other hand, the ecologic enlightenment should be advanced for re-establishing the new relation between human beings and their natural environment. In practice, the system of social Early-warning should be build up to monitor the short-term and long-term risks respectively; a rational and just global ecologic democracy should be established to answer for the common problems of risks by the cooperative actions all over the world and to prevent the developed countries from shifting risks onto the developing countries.