原文：

As this example shows, world risk society is faced by the awkward problem (here

one can no longer talk about irony) of having to make decisions about life and death,

war and peace, on the basis of more or less unadmitted not-knowing. Because the

dilemma lies also in the fact, that the option which relies on there being no danger, is

equally based on not-knowing and is equally high risk, in the sense that terrorists

really could acquire weapons of mass destruction, and do so precisely because we

believe in not being able to know and hence do nothing. In other words: The non-

compensatibility irony comes to a head in tragic fashion; if risks are held to be non-

compensatible, the problem of not-knowing is radicalised. If catastrophes are

anticipated whose potential for destruction ultimately threatens everyone, then a risk

calculation based on experience and rationality breaks down. Now all possible, more

or less improbable scenarios have to be taken into consideration, to knowledge,

therefore, drawn from experience and science there now also has to be added

imagination, suspicion, fiction, fear. Francois Ewald writes: “...the precautionary

principle requires an active use of doubt, in the sense Descartes made canonical in

his meditations. Before any action, I must not only ask myself what I need to know

and what I need to master, but also what I do not know, what I dread or suspect. I

must, out of precaution, imagine the worst possible, the consequence that an

infinitely deceptive, malicious demon could have slipped into the false of apparently

innocent enterprise.”