Climate Change Denial as a Value-Based Problem

Abstract

While the reality of climate change is widely accepted within the scientific community and supported by overwhelming amounts of data and research, it is still rejected by a significant portion of the general population. Traditionally, belief is thought to be governed by descriptive facts – as following the truth as an individual finds it when looking out into the world. However, belief has a significant normative component, as well. The answer to the question “What should I believe?” is not simply given just by appealing to the facts. It requires addressing further issues, such as proper justification of belief, trustworthiness of sources and conflict with antecedently held beliefs and values. Changing a person’s beliefs is not as easy as just giving them the correct facts. We want to argue that climate change denialism is a problem that needs to be partially explained in normative terms, and therefor strategies for dealing with this problem need to include normative responses. To this end, we want to analyze the issue through the lens of the virtue epistemology. We argue that the insights from this philosophical sub-discipline have value both in addressing climate change denialism on the level of the individual (by providing people with the epistemic tools in the form of epistemic virtues which allow them to find and incorporate truths into their framework of beliefs even in domains with high levels of disinformation), as well as the organizational level (by providing language and concepts that help organizations avoid epistemic vices which make them more untrustworthy as sources of information).