Book Report | Philosophy | Determinism
Free Will and Sam Harris
Internally Incongruent Secular Humanist Dogma Masquerading as Mediocre Philosophy
“You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.”
There is a peculiar tension in Sam Harris’s worldview that becomes most glaringly obvious when he discusses Donald Trump. Few public intellectuals have condemned the former president as harshly as Harris — he has, at various points, referred to him as the “most immoral person” he has ever encountered, a “malignant narcissist,” and an existential threat to democracy.
One does not need to be a Trump apologist to recognise the incongruity here: if Harris’s thesis in the publication Free Will (2012) is correct, then Mr. Trump is no more responsible for his behaviour than a hurricane is responsible for making landfall. Indeed, the same inexorable chain of prior causes that has rendered all of us passive spectators in our own lives has, by Harris’s own logic, produced Donald Trump in all his populist, social media era-fuelled glory.
The implication is obvious but seemingly lost on Harris — if free will is an illusion, then moral condemnation of individuals becomes a farce. And yet, Harris appears incapable of resisting the very same moral outrage that his own book argues is philosophically indefensible. In the end, one wonders whether Harris is in the grip of the very illusion he so forcefully claims to dispel.
Laplace’s Demon
The Omniscient Mathematician and the Death of Human Choice
Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Demon is the granddaddy of hard determinism, a thought experiment so elegant and so terrifying in its implications that it has haunted physics and philosophy ever since its inception. Imagine, Laplace proposed, an intelligence so vast and omniscient that it knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe at a given moment. With this knowledge, it could, in theory, predict the entire future of the cosmos with perfect accuracy — every decision you think you make, every word you believe you choose, every so-called impulse of free will, all of it reducible to a preordained sequence of molecular interactions dictated by the fundamental laws of physics.
There is no randomness, no deviation, no wiggle room. The present is the necessary consequence of the past, just as the future is the inescapable outgrowth of the present. Harris, with his relentless commitment to determinism, embraces a modern version of Laplace’s Demon, albeit dressed up in neuroscientific garb. But here’s the rub: quantum mechanics — our best working theory of reality — has long since put a dagger in the heart of strict determinism, introducing probabilistic uncertainty at the most fundamental level of physical reality.
Harris, however, brushes this aside as irrelevant to the question of free will, arguing that even if events at the quantum level are indeterminate, this randomness hardly equates to autonomy. Thus, he finds himself in a peculiar position: championing a vision of determinism that physics itself has, at the very least, complicated — while simultaneously dismissing compatibilist philosophers who have spent centuries refining the nuances of agency within a causally structured world.
If Free Will is an Illusion, Why Does Harris Seem So Angry?
Meaningless Moral Indignation in a Deterministic Universe
Sam Harris is nothing if not consistent — except, of course, when he isn’t. His argument against free will is unambiguous: every action, belief, and moral failure is the inevitable result of prior causes stretching back to the dawn of time. And yet, Harris does not merely describe this deterministic procession with clinical detachment; he rages against it. His indignation at bad arguments, his scorn for religious fundamentalists, his exasperation with the irrationality of human beings — these are not the words of a man serenely accepting the mechanistic universe he describes. They are the words of someone deeply, personally frustrated by the choices of others. But therein lies the contradiction: if free will is an illusion, why does Harris behave as though people should know better?
Take his denunciation of religious dogma. Harris has spent much of his career dismantling the intellectual foundations of faith, delivering lacerating critiques of those who, in his view, allow superstition to triumph over reason. He portrays religious extremists as dangerously misguided and the institutions that promote them as corrupt relics of a less enlightened past. His rhetoric is often uncompromising — at times, outright scathing. Yet under his own metaphysical, ontological framework, these people could not have done otherwise. Their beliefs, their convictions, their very identities are the product of genetics, upbringing, and historical contingency. To express anger at them is, in effect, to berate the wind for blowing.
This same incongruity pervades Harris’s treatment of pseudoscience and irrationality in general. From alternative medicine to conspiracy theories, he sees misinformation as one of the great plagues of the modern world. And yet, if free will is a mirage, then charlatans and their followers are no more culpable for their beliefs than Harris is laudable for his liberal secular scientific humanism. The very concept of intellectual responsibility becomes meaningless. One might argue that Harris, as a public intellectual, sees it as his duty to reshape the causal chain — to be one more domino in the great cascade of homo sapien history, nudging others toward reason. But this, too, assumes that persuasion is something more than a deterministic spectacle. Why bother engaging with an opponent’s argument if they have no actual control over whether they accept or reject it?
Furthermore, as I and others have written here on Medium, reason and rationality, contrary to how they are espoused by post-enlightenment modern humanists, is not some powerful panacea combination of collective and/or individual anti-religious feats that leads the fraught human condition out from strife up towards continuously improving utopia-adjacent vistas. Pre-eminent reason as overarching psycho-philosophical social algorithm seems invariably or often enough to lead to post-reason horrors, which is evidently far from the sane, rational coordinates it’s antecedent aspired to and from which it was apparently engineered. Scientific atheism is de facto another form of quasi-religiosity, albeit dressed up cleverly, leading to similar religious or anti-rationality quagmires about which the likes of Harris, Richard Dawkins et al have so disdainfully written — and through which they built their wildly profitable literary careers — for so long. As many have demonstrated before, including Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens (2015), humanism and even modern atheism, depend upon a curious, subtle incongruence/cognitive dissonance/aporia by even the second premise of their central, foundational disquisition; ironically, they trade one fictional mythological zealotry for another, God for Humanity, theology for Human Rights, eschatology for techo-democratic utopia.
Daniel Dennett, ever the pragmatist, finds this contradiction especially grating. He has accused Harris of overstating his case, of conflating the rejection of libertarian free will with a fatalistic resignation that undermines the very fabric of moral discourse. In Freedom Evolves, Dennett argues that we do, in fact, possess a meaningful form of agency — one that emerges from our capacity for reflection, deliberation, and self-modification. He sees Harris’s approach as both unnecessarily bleak and rhetorically self-defeating. As he wryly observes:
“Harris tells us that no one is responsible for anything. But then he blames people for being wrong. How does that work?”
And that, ultimately, is the crux of the paradox. Harris’s rhetoric is full of implicit “shoulds” — people should value reason, they should reject bad arguments, they should strive for egalitarian universal equality (except perhaps, from his perspective, the people of Palestine), they should strive for intellectual integrity. But in a world where all thoughts and decisions are simply the inevitable outputs of a deterministic system, the very notion of a “should” collapses. His anger, his frustration, his palpable sense of moral urgency — all of it presupposes the very thing he denies.
If Harris were truly at peace with his conclusions, his arguments would read less like a polemic and more like a weather report: Today’s forecast calls for widespread religious delusion, a 90% chance of pseudoscience, and scattered outbreaks of irrationality. There is nothing to be done about it — these are simply the conditions of the universe.
But that is not how he speaks. Instead, he argues, he pleads, he preaches, he condemns, he condescends, he castigates. He calls for a world in which people reject superstition (read as: non-secular humanist superstition), embrace reason, and take responsibility for their beliefs. And in doing so, he unwittingly affirms the very thing he seeks to dismantle.
Why Dennett and Other Philosophers Think He’s Overplaying His Hand
The Illusion of the Illusion of Free Will
If there were a Mount Rushmore of contemporary free will skepticism, Sam Harris would undoubtedly claim a prominent place — perhaps next to the chiseled likeness of B.F. Skinner or a cybernetic rendering of Laplace’s Demon. But his fellow travelers in philosophy, even those who share his skepticism toward libertarian free will, often find his absolutism grating. Chief among his critics is the above mentioned Daniel Dennett, the high priest of compatibilism, who has repeatedly accused Harris of making a category error so egregious it would embarrass an undergraduate philosophy student.
Harris’s central mistake, according to Dennett and others, is his assumption that “free will” must be of the radical, supernatural variety — some immaterial Cartesian ghost in the neural machine — rather than a pragmatic, functional concept that describes our actual decision-making processes. In Harris’s world, anything short of godlike ex nihilo creation of thoughts and choices is indistinguishable from absolute determinism. For Dennett, this is the equivalent of saying that because birds don’t fly like angels, they don’t “really” fly at all.
In his review of Free Will, Dennett pulls no punches:
“If you think that free will is an illusion, I am afraid you are not thinking very carefully.”
Dennett argues that Harris commits the “fallacy of greedy reductionism” — an overzealous attempt to reduce a complex, emergent phenomenon (decision-making, moral responsibility) to its lowest physical denominator (neural firings, deterministic laws). But this reductionism misses a crucial point: free will, as we experience and define it, is a social and psychological reality, not a metaphysical absolute. Much like concepts such as “justice” or “money,” its validity depends on its functionality within human life, not on some ultimate atomic explanation.
To illustrate the absurdity of Harris’s stance, Dennett poses a thought experiment: Imagine two worlds, one in which humans have Harrisian “no free will,” where all choices are determined by prior causes, and another where humans have the kind of compatibilist free will Dennett defends — where conscious deliberation, reasoning, and self-control shape behavior. If the differences between these two worlds are meaningful (as they obviously are when it comes to law, ethics, and personal responsibility), then Harris’s black-and-white framing is simply misguided — and perhaps even destructive, dangerous.
Other philosophers have joined the fray. Alfred Mele, in his work on “autonomy,” has pointed out that even if subconscious neural processes contribute to decision-making, this does not negate the role of conscious deliberation in shaping behavior over time. Patricia Churchland has likewise criticised Harris for treating neuroscience as a blunt weapon against philosophy, arguing that his approach is “dangerously close to scientism” — the tendency to assume that only empirical science can answer complex philosophical questions.
Moreover, as critics have noted, Harris’s stance seems to suffer from an internal contradiction: he spends an entire book trying to convince his readers that they have no free will, yet at the same time, he assumes they have the rational agency to weigh his arguments and abandon their false beliefs. If Harris were truly consistent, he might as well open Free Will with:
You were always going to agree or disagree with this book based on causes beyond your control, so honestly, why bother reading further?
Indeed, the very act of persuasion — Harris’s attempt to change minds — relies on the assumption that people can reflect, evaluate, and choose to update their beliefs. This is precisely what Dennett and other compatibilists argue: free will is not about some metaphysical exemption from causality but about the ability to act on reasons, reflect on motivations, and influence one’s own future behaviour.
Ultimately, Harris’s position represents a kind of philosophical Puritanism — an insistence that if free will isn’t absolute and unconditioned, it must be entirely fraudulent. But as Dennett reminds us, the world is rarely so binary, and a concept doesn’t need to be metaphysically pure to be pragmatically meaningful. Otherwise, we might as well conclude that morality, responsibility, and even the self are illusions too — at which point, philosophy, especially ethics, collapses into abject, amoral, Schopenhauer-adjacent nihilism, and Harris, to borrow from Hume, would do well to throw his own book into the flames.
The Libet Leap
How Neuroscience Became a Blunt Instrument Against Free Will
Harris, like many determinists before him, finds a convenient ally in the 1983 experiments of Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist whose work has been widely cited — if not wildly misunderstood — as the death knell for free will. The experiment in question was simple but, at the time, groundbreaking: Libet asked participants to flick their wrists at a moment of their choosing while noting the precise instant they felt the conscious urge to do so. Meanwhile, their brain activity was monitored via EEG. The results were, at first glance, stunning: a measurable rise in brain activity — the so-called readiness potential (or Bereitschaftspotential) — was detected up to 500 milliseconds before the subjects became consciously aware of their decision. In other words, their brains “knew” what they were going to do before they did.
For Harris, this was the smoking gun. If the unconscious brain is the true puppeteer, and consciousness merely a spectator to its own unfolding decisions, then the very notion of freely willed action collapses. The feeling of agency, he argues, is a post hoc rationalization, a convenient fiction the brain tells itself to maintain the illusion of control. But as many neuroscientists and philosophers have pointed out, Harris’s interpretation of Libet’s results is, at best, an overstatement and, at worst, a fundamental category error.
First, the readiness potential does not dictate what the person will do — it merely signals that a preparatory neural process is underway. It’s akin to the brain warming up an engine before it even knows which direction it will drive. Subsequent studies (Schurger et al., 2012) have shown that this brain activity is more probabilistic than deterministic; rather than issuing commands, it reflects fluctuating background noise that only sometimes precedes a decision. Crucially, later research has demonstrated that people can veto their initial impulses even after the readiness potential has been detected. In other words, conscious intervention is still in play.
Second, Libet himself — far from being the radical determinist that Harris assumes — was not convinced that his results disproved free will in any meaningful sense. In fact, he introduced the concept of the “conscious veto,” suggesting that while the brain may initiate a decision unconsciously, the conscious mind still has the ability to override or inhibit an action before it is executed. This would place free will not at the point of initiation but at the point of intervention, a refinement that many compatibilists have since championed.
Third, and perhaps most damning for Harris, is the fact that the Libet experiment deals exclusively with spontaneous, arbitrary movements — flicking a wrist or pressing a button — rather than the kind of complex, deliberative choices that make up the bulk of human decision-making. The fact that neural processes precede a snap motor action is hardly surprising; it tells us nothing about whether we are freely weighing arguments, debating moral dilemmas, or consciously shaping our futures. One might as well argue that because the brain prepares to blink before we are aware of it, we therefore lack control over our ethical convictions.
Yet Harris takes the Libet experiment and runs with it — straight off a philosophical cliff.
In doing so, he commits a classic error: conflating the timing of awareness with the absence of control. That we are not immediately conscious of every neural precursor to action does not mean we are mere passengers in a pre-scripted drama. Indeed, much of human cognition operates below the level of conscious awareness — language processing, visual recognition, emotional regulation — yet we do not typically conclude that we have no agency simply because we cannot perceive the underlying mechanics of these processes. To do so would be to mistake the plumbing for the house.
Ultimately, Libet’s findings may reveal something intriguing about the structure of decision-making, but they are hardly the death knell for free will. The readiness potential is not fate’s signature on the brain; it is, at most, a whisper of intention — one that can be shaped, redirected, or outright ignored. Harris’s reliance on it as definitive proof of determinism suggests less a commitment to rigorous neuroscience than an eagerness to embrace evidence that conforms to his philosophical predispositions.
Moral Responsibility Without Free Will?
The Curious Case of Holding People Accountable for Actions They Never Chose
At this point in Harris’s deterministic sermon, the astute reader might begin to wonder: if we are all merely marionettes dancing on the strings of physics and biology, why should anyone be held morally responsible for anything? Why should we blame a criminal for their crimes, praise a hero for their courage, or even bother debating moral philosophy at all if every action is preordained by the relentless churn of prior causes? Harris, ever the sophisticated determinist, attempts to have his cake and eat it too — arguing that, yes, moral responsibility as traditionally conceived is a fiction, but this doesn’t mean we should dismantle the justice system and descend into some chaotic nihilistic free-for-all.
Harris proposes what can only be described as a kind of moral consequentialism stripped of any notion of desert (as in just deserts). Instead of punishing criminals because they “deserve” it in any deep sense, we should treat them the way we treat malfunctioning machinery — detaining, rehabilitating, or permanently quarantining them based on their danger to society. He writes:
“Certain criminals are simply broken as people. We do not hold a grizzly bear morally responsible for killing a hiker, but we do lock it away or kill it to protect future hikers. Why should we view human predators any differently?”
This analogy is provocative, to say the least. If there is no meaningful difference between a serial killer and an apex predator, then the entire humanist edifice of ethics — built on the idea that people can choose to be good or evil — collapses into a morally indifferent landscape where “justice” is merely a euphemism for social utility. But is Harris really comfortable with this conclusion?
His response is a kind of ethical pragmatism: while people don’t “deserve” blame in a libertarian sense, society still needs deterrence, accountability, and rehabilitation. This is not, in itself, an absurd position. Many legal theorists have long argued that punishment is primarily about deterrence and incapacitation rather than retribution. But Harris’s determinism makes his moral framework deeply unsettling — because if nobody ever had a choice in the first place, then “reform” or “rehabilitation” are just as meaningless as blame. A murderer, after all, did not choose to kill any more than a therapist chooses to believe in reform; both are just causal byproducts of a chain reaction stretching back to the Big Bang.
One of Harris’s sharpest critics on this front is the philosopher Galen Strawson, who argues that if determinism is true, then no moral framework — Harris’s included — can make coherent sense. In what he calls the “Basic Argument,” Strawson points out that if you are not ultimately responsible for the way you are (your genetic predispositions, your upbringing, your influences), then you cannot be responsible for anything that flows from those factors. Harris, rather than confronting this head-on, simply sidesteps it — insisting that we can act as though people are responsible while maintaining that, on some deeper level, they are not.
Daniel Dennett, too, finds Harris’s position insufficient. In Freedom Evolves, he argues that holding people responsible is not about cosmic desert but about reinforcing behaviours that shape a functional society. He compares Harris’s stance to a child discovering there’s no Santa Claus and then demanding that Christmas be canceled entirely — whereas in reality, the gifts keep coming, and the holiday retains its value, Santa or no Santa. The absence of libertarian free will, in other words, does not render responsibility meaningless unless one insists on an overly rigid definition of what “responsibility” entails.
And herein lies the problem with Harris’s framework: it is profoundly counterintuitive. While it is certainly possible to construct a society that operates without moral desert, it would be a cold, mechanistic system, one where virtue and vice are ascribed the same level of metaphysical significance as the functioning of a thermostat. We do not praise the air conditioner for cooling a room, nor do we blame it when it fails; we simply repair or replace it. The question is: is this really, presuming we wish to maintain civilised existence, such as it is, the way we should or could see human beings?
Harris would argue that it doesn’t matter how it feels — this is simply how reality is. But if reality requires us to discard one of the most fundamental aspects of human moral psychology — the belief in agency, responsibility, and the ability to shape our own destinies — perhaps it is not reality but Harris’s framework that is flawed.
The Rhetorical Paradox of Free Will
Trying to Convince People Who Have No Choice But to Disagree
Sam Harris approaches free will as a prosecutor approaches a murder trial — with a preordained guilty verdict and an exhaustive list of reasons why the accused (in this case, free will itself) is a fraud. But lurking beneath his philosophical execution of this ancient concept is a peculiar paradox: if Harris is correct, if we are all just meat puppets operating under the rigid dictates of physics and neurochemistry, then what exactly is the point of writing the book?
Harris, of course, would argue that he had no choice in the matter — he was caused to write the book by a complex interplay of neurons, influences, and the inevitable march of causality. But then, by his own logic, his readers have no choice in whether they accept his argument or reject it outright. One might imagine a reader finishing the book, tossing it aside, and declaring, “Well, I was determined to believe in free will anyway, so thanks for nothing.”
This is where Harris’s rhetorical position begins to eat itself. If belief and disbelief are preordained, then persuasion itself becomes an absurdity. Harris spends 96 pages passionately — and admittedly adroitly — arguing that people should change their view about free will — despite having already insisted that people do not choose their views in the first place. At best, his book functions as a deterministic cog in the machine, causing some readers to inevitably agree with him and others to inevitably scoff. At worst, it collapses into an exercise in futility, a metaphysical dead-end where “truth” is just another predetermined arrangement of thoughts, wholly outside the control of the thinker.
Daniel Dennett, whose entire philosophy revolves around pragmatic usefulness, finds this aspect of Harris’s work particularly egregious. In his characteristically scathing review, Dennett points out that Harris is doing precisely what he claims is impossible — trying to influence minds. As Dennett writes:
“Harris presents himself as an honest investigator exposing a cherished illusion, but then fails to recognize that his own arguments depend on the very capacities he insists we don’t have.”
If we take Harris seriously, then there is no meaningful sense in which persuasion is even possible — it’s just another deterministic process playing out, an automatic response to prior conditions. But this is a problem for Harris, because much of his broader intellectual career depends on the assumption that people can be reasoned with. His work on morality, religion, and politics all rests on the premise that rational thought can override dogma, emotion, and bad arguments. His entire modus operandi as a public intellectual — debating, refuting, and dismantling falsehoods — presupposes that people are capable of changing their minds in response to evidence and reason. But his strict determinism undermines this very notion.
Harris does attempt a preemptive defense. He argues that while individuals do not control their beliefs in the moment, they can still be influenced by new information over time. But this is a deeply unsatisfying hedge. Either people have some agency in how they process and respond to arguments, or they don’t. If they don’t, then Harris might as well be lecturing a rock about the illusion of geological free will.
And this contradiction extends beyond philosophy into politics. Harris, in his broader work, as mentioned above, has been one of the most vocal critics of President Donald Trump, calling him “the worst person I’ve ever known” and a “black hole of selfishness.” But here’s the rub: if Harris truly believes in his brand of determinism, then Trump — just like everyone else — is merely a product of physics, genetics, and history. His narcissism, dishonesty, and mendacity were never his fault in any meaningful sense. By Harris’s logic, Trump had no more choice in his behavior than a tornado has in destroying a town.
And yet, Harris does not seem to apply his free will skepticism evenly. His denunciations of Trump are filled with zealous liberal secular humanist moral outrage, as though Trump were personally responsible for his decisions. But responsibility, in the Harrisian framework, is an illusion. So why, then, does Harris rail against Trump in such moral terms? If we are all just billiard balls bouncing around according to Newtonian principles, why direct anger at a particular ball for landing in the wrong pocket?
This is the deeper paradox of Harris’s rhetoric: he wants to argue against free will while behaving — through persuasion, argument, and moral judgment — as if it exists. He wants to eradicate blame while indulging in moral denunciations. He wants to convince readers that they have no choice, while depending on their ability to choose to agree. In the end, Harris’s book is not so much a treatise against free will as it is a demonstration of its inescapability. No matter how many times he insists that choice is an illusion, he cannot seem to help acting as though he believes otherwise.
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer.
References
Dennett, D. C. (2003). Freedom Evolves. Viking.
Dennett, D. C. (2012). Reflections on Sam Harris’ Free Will. Retrieved from
Harris, S. (2012). Free Will. Free Press.
S. (2016). The Worst Possible President. Waking Up Podcast.
Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8(4), 529–566.
Nietzsche, F. (1886). Beyond Good and Evil (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage.
Sapolsky, R. (2017). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin Press.
Smilansky, S. (2000). Free Will and Illusion. Oxford University Press.
Strawson, G. (1994). The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility. Philosophical Studies, 75(1–2), 5–24.
Strawson, G. (2010). Freedom and Belief. Oxford University Press.
Wegner, D. M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press.
. (2025). From the Age of Reason to Postmodern Sophistry. Medium. http://jeetwincasinos.com/grim-tidings/from-the-age-of-reason-to-postmodern-sophistry-a86b5b92097d
Thanks for reading.
