Should Liberal Communities Respect Bad Believers? On Empirical Disagreement over Climate Change and Public Reason

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Public reason liberalism strives to accommodate as broad an array of viewpoints as possible. Some people are selective science skeptics, meaning that they disagree with parts of mainstream science. Of special interest for this paper are climate deniers, who disagree with the mainstream consensus views of climate science. This creates a problem for public reason: on the one hand, public reason wants to avoid basing rules and policies on controversial principles, values, and so on. On the other hand, there are citizens whom we cannot outright call irrational who are skeptical about central tenets of climate science. This seems to imply that public reason cannot base policies on the robust findings of climate science because these findings are controversial among the
citizenry. But we have strong reasons to base our policies vis-à-vis climate change on the robust findings of climate science. How should we proceed?
Original languageEnglish
JournalDanish Yearbook of Philosophy
Number of pages23
ISSN0070-2749
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 2024

ID: 372189118