Sam Harris Doesn't Understand Compatibilism
Note: I’ve had some people share and speak about this article while misunderstanding my point, so I’ve made some edits to make it abundantly clear. Some people think this is a critique of incompatibilism, and a case for compatibilism. It’s not. It’s a critique of assuming that the incompatibilist account of freedom is correct without further argument (which is what Sam does). I also referred to myself as an “idiot” for having liked Sam Harris in the past, which probably came off a little mean spirited- so I removed that.
I’ve had many philosophical phases. As a teen, I was a hardcore nihilist. Later on, I graduated to an infatuation with Buddhism and Hinduism (which I still have a soft spot for). In my early to mid twenties, however, I moved onto my most pronounced phase - my Sam Harris one. A phase, it seems, that’s a very popular one to go through.
Sam Harris is a doorway into philosophy for many people because he talks about it in the mainstream. Most big bro-ey podcasts have had him as a guest at some point, talking about the benefits of meditation. He’s also very eloquent and comes off as a fairly grounded person. His influence is so big in fact, that the Ask Philosophy subreddit has an entire FAQ dedicated to explaining to his followers why he’s unpopular in academia.
Maybe one day I’ll get my own FAQ shitting on me. A boy can dream.
I am less into Sam Harris these days. I think he has some bad takes in a lot of domains, but nowhere is his overconfidence more on display than when he talks about free will. If you don’t know what Sam Harris’ stance is on free will, just look at any 19 year old’s Youtube comment on the topic and you’ll probably get the gist. He’s an Incompatibilist and a free will skeptic. Now, I don’t actually think these are insane views to hold - there are good defenses of both - but what makes Harris miss the mark is his bad reasons for holding these views. Most importantly, his total misunderstanding of Compatibilism.
The Free Will Debate
Let’s take a few steps back first and talk about what the free will debate even looks like. Obviously, the first question everyone is going to ask is “What is free will anyway?”. The most important thing to understand is that almost everyone speaking on the topic considers free will to be the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility, they just disagree on what that looks like sometimes. One divide in the debate is between Incompatiblists and Compatibilists. They get their names because they think that free will is either incompatible or compatible with Determinism respectively. This means that the debate is largely people coming up with thought experiments where they try to determine the conditions required for moral responsibility, before assessing if those conditions exist in a causally determined universe.
What Does Harris Say?
Sam thinks that in order for us to be morally responsible for our actions, we need to have the ability to have acted otherwise in the past than we in fact did. So, for example, I am writing this article right now, but I could’ve spent my evening tidying the flat instead (I never do that, ahah! Free will disproven!). This is a fairly common conception of what is required for moral responsibility, and is intuitive. After all, it seems like if you did some bad action X, but you were unable not to do X, you are absolved of responsibility. You can’t be responsible for something you can’t avoid, right?
However, Compatibilists deny this and say that something else is required for moral responsibility. There are many sophisticated views, but a simple one for our purposes is the ability to act on your own desires, without external impediment. That’s the only form of Compatibilism that Harris talks about anyway. So, if you aimed to do X, and no one forced you to do it, you are responsible for X - this clearly happens all the time, and would be compatible with Determinism.
Here’s where Sam makes his mistake. He time and again accuses Compatibilists of “changing the definition of free will”, as if they’ve done so on a whim. He assumes that free will just is the ability to have acted otherwise, and then says that Compatibilists aren’t talking about free will anymore - which misses what the whole Compatibilist/Incompatibilist debate is about. Remember, when philosophers ask “Do we have free will?” they’re asking “Do we have the freedom required for moral responsibility?” - so we need to determine what that freedom looks like. Incompatibilists and Compatibilists disagree. So Sam’s job is to explain why his Incompatbilist account is what’s required for moral responsibility, instead of assuming it’s correct, and accusing anyone that disagrees of arbitrary redefinition.
Here’s an analogy. Let’s say I’m in a debate with Sam about whether or not it’s right to pull the lever in the trolley problem. He’s a Utilitarian and says that pulling the lever maximizes utility, so pulling it is good. I, however, think it violates the rights of the one person, so it’s wrong. The question we need to answer here is clearly what’s the correct account of what’s good? So, he needs to argue for Utilitarianism, and I need to argue for my view. However, Sam’s approach to the free will debate amounts to him just saying “Well, maximizing utility just is what goodness is, and Connor is changing the definition of goodness” with no further elaboration - which is blatant question begging.
The question Compatibilists and Incompatibilists need to answer is “What’s the correct account of freedom?” - but he just ignores all that, assumes it’s the ability to have acted otherwise, and accuses compatibilists of word games if they disagree. He justifies this assumption by saying that that’s what “most people mean by free will”, but there are two issues with that. Firstly, it’s not obvious your average person actually has a conception of free will. I’d wager if you asked people on the street what free will is, you’d get a wide array of mostly confused answers. Secondly, we’re not trying to determine if the average person’s conception of free will exists, we’re trying to determine if the freedom required for moral responsibility exists. If you want to go off and have a debate about whether the average person’s conception of free will exists, that’s fine, but that’s a different (and much more boring) conversation to the one everyone else is having. You also can’t argue that the average person’s conception of free will doesn’t exist, and then conclude from that that moral responsibility doesn't exist - which is what he does.
The other mistake Sam makes is failing to come into contact with any of the literature on the topic. He categorizes Compatibilists as people that shoehorn free will into a determinism friendly definition because it helps them sleep at night. They’re not doing that. They define free will that way because they think that’s the correct conception of freedom - and they back it up with arguments. I have listened to Sam speak about free will at length, and he never actually speaks about why Compatibilists conceive of freedom the way they do. In this entire 45 minute lecture, he doesn’t mention Frankfurt Cases once. Feel free to correct me, but I’m not sure he’s ever spoken about them. To dismiss Compatibilism, without ever coming into contact with the most influential argument for it, is just negligent.
Like I say, I’m not even of the opinion that free will skepticism is dumb. There a lot of smart people that endorse it, and some arguments for Incompatibilism in particular can be quite compelling. However, even if it is correct, you can still have the correct view for the wrong reasons - and you’re more likely to have that happen if you treat opposing views with unjustified contempt. I think Harris has a bad habit of doing this, and I’m not surprised I don’t spend much time listening to him anymore - unless I’m taking a moment to focus on the breath (His guided meditations are still decent!).
I am so happy you wrote this piece focused on moral responsibility because it’s something I feel that many hard incompatiblists often gloss over. Even as a pretty staunch incompatiblist myself, I’m at the point where I find it hard to read or listen to other incompatiblists talk about compatiblism because of they don’t often acknowledge that, between determinists, the free will debate is about moral responsibility.
> I’d wager if you asked people on the street what free will is, you’d get a wide array of mostly confused answers.
BUT SO WOULD SAM HARRIS! He claims that the average notion _is_ confused and inconsistent.
Also, more on the point, while he tend to relegate this to footnotes, in his book(let) on Free Will, he (correctly, imo) notes that "compatibilist" redefinition doesn't change the answers for moral responsibility (and even claims Dennett agrees).