How to make value-driven climate science for policy more ethical

In previous works, I examine inferential methods employed in Probabilistic Weather Event Attribution studies (PEAs), and explored various ways they can be used to aid in climate policy decisions and decision-making about climate justice issues. This paper evaluates limitations of PEAs and considers how PEA researchers’ attributions of “liability” to specific countries for specific extreme weather events could be made more ethical. In sum, I show that it is routinely presupposed that PEA methods are not prone to inductive risks and presuppose that PEA researchers thus have no epistemic consequences or responsibilities for their attributions of liability. I argue that although PEAs are nevertheless crucially useful for practical decision-making, the attributions of liability made by PEA researchers are in fact prone to indicative risks and are influenced by non-epistemic values that PEA researchers should make transparent to make such studies more ethical. Finally, I outline possible normative approaches for making sciences, including PEAs, more ethical; and discuss implications of my arguments for the ongoing debate about how PEAs should guide climate policy and relevant legal decisions.