September 29, 2026 @ 16:00 – 17:30 CEST
In the second session of this online seminar series, we welcomed Casey Helgeson (Penn State University) as our speaker. We discussed his co-authored chapter “How Uncertainty Interacts With Ethical Values In Climate Change Research” (2025), resulting from the interaction and collaboration with Nancy Tuana and Wendy Parker in an interdisciplinary Summer School on “Uncertainty in Climate Research”. Helgeson described the chapter as deliberately synthetic and pedagogical: although rooted in philosophy of science, it was written primarily for researchers outside philosophy, with the ambition of ‘meeting them where they are’ and encouraging them to reflect on the ethical presuppositions and implications of their own research practices. The concept of coupled ethical-epistemic choices was a deliberate and successful framing: its value lies in making visible how ethical and epistemic considerations are intertwined throughout research without resorting to overly complex philosophical jargon that might prove inaccessible to non-philosophers.
A central focus in the discussion was addressing the gap between recognizing the existence of values and knowing how to consequently manage them. The paper argues that many research decisions have both epistemic and ethical dimensions, and recommends that researchers explicitly consider which values their frameworks assume and prioritize. However, the discussion revealed that translating this theoretical concern into practice might not be so straightforward. Experiences from interdisciplinary climate projects indicate that researchers can become aware that values matter while remaining unsure about how to operationalize this insight. In some cases, ethical reflection may be perceived as an element added to the research post hoc, rather than as something capable of reshaping its design from the outset. This raises important practical questions about what concrete procedures, institutional structures, or forms of training could enable and support researchers to incorporate ethical considerations.
The conversation then moved toward possible ways of identifying and managing values embedded in climate research. Engagement with end users, stakeholders, and boundary organizations can be a way of aligning research with different values and priorities. Rather than expecting individual scientists to identify all relevant ethical considerations themselves, stakeholder engagement can broaden the range of knowledge and values entering the research process, potentially affecting modelling practices, parameter choices, and validation standards. Moreover, interdisciplinarity can be an efficient mechanism through which values become visible. Researchers are trained within particular disciplinary cultures, and many assumptions about what constitutes a good research approach are learned through apprenticeship, which is tacitly acquired rather than explicitly articulated. Collaboration across disciplines can therefore expose assumptions that remain invisible within a single community. Yet values also travel between communities. Climate science may incorporate assumptions originating in economics, policy, modelling, or other fields, while researchers have limited control over how these assumptions are subsequently embedded in projections for broad public communication. The discussion highlighted the resulting difficulty of making all relevant values visible, particularly when research becomes dependent on external datasets or models whose methodological and normative assumptions are not transparent.
Finally, Helgeson emphasized the messiness and institutional difficulty of interdisciplinary research itself. The literature on co-production and interdisciplinary collaboration is dispersed across fields. Moreover, many interdisciplinary projects can fail to integrate disciplines, stakeholders, or forms of knowledge despite explicitly aiming to do so. Rather than attempting a comprehensive set of guidelines, Helgeson suggests that narrower empirical studies could help identify the concrete challenges and conditions under which interdisciplinary and co-produced research succeeds or breaks down. Importantly, the discussion stressed the need to make failures discussable: publishing only successful examples can obscure the practical difficulties of integrating values and disciplines, whereas examining failures may provide the knowledge needed to make climate research more reflexive and relevant.
Organisers: Sapna Kumar and Futura Venuto