A Response to Sam Harris

His clarification tweet thread was clarifying, all right....

These passages from Sam Harris’s book, Lying, are most relevant to my essay, though I will cite it more extensively.

“In those circumstances where we deem it obviously necessary to lie, we have generally determined that the person to be deceived is both dangerous and unreachable by any recourse to the truth. In other words, we have judged the prospects of establishing a genuine relationship with him to be nonexistent. For most of us, such circumstances arise very rarely in life, if ever.”

and

Two Types of Lies

Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission)…most of what I say is relevant to lies of omission and to deception generally.

and

“The intent to communicate honestly is the measure of truthfulness. And most of us do not require a degree in philosophy to distinguish this attitude from its counterfeits…..Whatever our purpose in telling them, lies can be gross or subtle. Some entail elaborate ruses or forged documents. Others consist merely of euphemisms or tactical silences….The moment we consider our dishonesty from the perspective of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed….”

— Sam Harris, Lying (emphasis added)

Sam Harris tweeted a 6-tweet thread yesterday in response to the Triggernometry episode (which I wrote about here) going viral. It was a masterfully worded work of dishonesty.

The Sam Harris who wrote Lying might have used it as a case study in deception of such purity that its sheer craftsmanship is almost admirable.

That the interview begins with his offering a paean to his commitment to intellectual honesty will forever stand beside Westboro Baptist Church’s insistence that they picket funerals out of love in the annals of self-delusion.

Here are screenshots of his tweets, and my commentary on why they’re horseshit.

Let’s start with tweet 1. Sam lies in this tweet by saying that he wasn’t speaking very clearly.

Sam Harris is a widely published author of multiple best-selling books who makes a living having conversations in public. He is not just a clear speaker, he is in fact unusually articulate. In the Triggernometry episode, he was exceptionally clear. Konstantin and Francis gave him multiple opportunities to backtrack, caveat, and clarify his more incendiary statements. He doubled and tripled down. He may have changed his mind, which is always allowed and in this case would be laudable, but he has to own that. He doesn’t get to pretend that he wasn’t totally clear. He was.

“Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say;”

“I have learned that I would rather be maladroit, or even rude, than dishonest.”

—Sam Harris, Lying

In tweet 2, he sets up the big lie he will tell later.

He claims that he was arguing for a principle of self-defense, wherein a continuum of proportionate and necessary force is applied against an imminent threat.

Why does the concept of proportionate and necessary self-defense exist on a continuum? Because self-defense as a protective and justifying concept is needed when one has committed an act that one needs a defense for, by definition an act that is illegal! He sets up the scenario of using a legal defense philosophy in tweet 2. Why?

In tweet 3, he ratchets up the rhetoric on the need for self-defense, asserting that a grandiose narcissist (yes, Trump is a clinical narcissist) refusing to commit in advance to a scenario of gracefully accepting a loss (imagine that) makes a danger—a danger for which he has already asserted that the legal defense concept of the continuum of force applies—even greater than he has already claimed it to be.

In tweet 4, he lies again. He was not speaking narrowly. He spoke quite broadly, in terms of the sun vs a firefly, of asteroids hitting the earth and that making normal responses unthinkable and outrageous responses appropriate; he cited Trump as a “once in a lifetime moral emergency.”

The “imminent threat” moral emergency is a trope he has used repeatedly, including in citing examples of times when torture is ethically justifiable. Further, the narrow terms of one news story being ignored and/or suppressed (mainstream media and social media platforms did both) at one moment in time would not, under any circumstances, require invoking the legal philosophy of the self-defense continuum.

The Sam Harris who wrote Lying would not have seen this as a hard call.

“Rather often, to lie is to infringe on the freedom of those we care about.” —Sam Harris, Lying

In tweet 5, he reveals himself to be a consequentialist—and not even a smart or very thoughtful one. He is someone who judges morality by the immediate consequences, without the ability to consider the second-order and other consequences of “absolutely warranted” conspiracies to influence elections, the one and only place that Americans used to agree we all have an equal, and equally important, voice—without respect to money, social class, or other considerations.

He also reveals himself to be, fully and by his own definition and standard, a liar.

Again, from his book on Lying (the header is his, as well):

Two Types of Lies

Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We tend to judge the former far more harshly…

…most of what I say is relevant to lies of omission and to deception generally.

This level of short-sighted hypocrisy from the author of Lying, a book that eloquently argues that the long-term consequences of lying are both worthy of moral consideration and so important that a principle of never lying is one we should all live by, is heartbreaking.

“When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives….this is an extraordinary stance to adopt toward other human beings, and it requires justification. Unless someone is suicidal or otherwise on the brink, deciding how much he should know about himself is the quitessence of arrogance. What attitude could be more disrespectful of those we care about?”

—Sam Harris, Lying

Finally, in tweet 6, he finishes the lie he starts setting up in tweet 2.

He lies both directly and indirectly in this one. Nothing he said was meant to imply that illegal measures would have been justified.

He didn’t imply that illegal measures would have been justified.

He flat-out said it, including in this tweet thread!

The very notion of any emergency, much less a once-in-a-lifetime, asteroid-level, existential threat emergency, is one in which normal rules, laws, and limits do not apply. Driving 90 miles per hour is against the law, but if your wife is crowning in the backseat or your passenger is gushing blood from a stab wound, you drive 90 miles per hour, fully confident that if you draw the attention of law enforcement, their duty of care will not just spare you the consequences of your illegal act of speeding, it will require them to give you a police escort to the hospital, not give you a ticket while your child is born in the backseat or your passenger bleeds to death.

Killing another human being is illegal, but justified under imminent threat via the continuum of self-defense so kindly brought into this discussion by Sam Harris. He invoked the need for the continuum of self-defense, specifically citing the legally relevant aspects that determine what, if anything, the self-defender will be charged for after breaking the law—of proportionate and necessary force, and then claims: gasp!

Why, he wasn’t implying that illegal measures would have been justified!!

Harris gave no limiting principle to his position that stopping Trump by hiding information from the voters (which is, again, itself unequivocally and absolutely lying by the standard he set in his book about lying) was justified by any means necessary.

Harris may in fact have a moral line wherein reporting on and considering potential Joe Biden complicity in Hunter Biden’s illegality would be required, even if it helped Trump—I don’t know—but if he does, he drew it beyond the corpses of children. For him to turn around and claim that he wasn’t implying that (gasp!) illegality would be justified is, plainly, insulting.

The point that Francis and Konstantin made in pushing back, that once you start justifying subverting democracy to save democracy, you’ve lost democracy — it was clearly lost on him.

It must not be lost on the rest of us.

Mutually Assured Destruction

One of my commenters yesterday cited this passage from A Man for All Seasons:

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.

Ethical Reckoning is Mandatory

I am honored by the fact that Helen Dale is one of my subscribers. She commented at length on yesterday’s essay (thread here) citing Harris’s failure to do ethical reckoning as one reason why he is taken far too seriously (and gave some really fascinating information about how lawyers are trained outside of the US).

The danger in subverting the will of the voters in order to save them should be obvious to any middle schooler. Fans of the “Akchually” style of rhetoric will cite Hitler as a possible exception, but Harris has specifically ruled this out. Trump isn’t Hitler, and even Harris can admit this.

I may have missed it — if so, please comment or email me — but I don’t think Harris has ever publicly considered what it means with regard to his position that Trump’s potential re-election constituted a “once in a lifetime moral emergency” that Trump got about 11 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. That his fellow Americans did not view Trump in anything remotely resembling the terms he did appears to have either slipped his notice entirely or not mattered at all in his moral reasoning process.

The Stomach-Churning Conclusion

Sam Harris believes that democracy itself—voters having all the available information from which to make up their own minds—is something against which the legal defense philosophy of self-defense is an appropriate consideration.

The man is an authoritarian in meditation teacher’s clothing.

He would build and populate gulags without ever once suffering a moment of hesitation, much less self-doubt, and sleep like a contented child.

The one blessing of this debacle, which has been disasteful in the extreme both to watch and write about, is that the mask is fully removed.

He said the quiet part out loud. We need only believe him. And we should.

Housekeeping

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