The Contradiction at the Heart of Sam Harris’s Philosophy

He built a career on rational conversation and moral clarity. Until it no longer served his goals.

The cover that couldn’t cover the contradiction.

It doesn’t take many words to expose the flaw in Sam Harris’s philosophy. I’m honestly surprised more people haven’t said it outright.

For nearly two decades, Sam Harris positioned himself as a voice of moral clarity. In The End of Faith (2004), he attacked religion as a source of irrational dogma. In The Moral Landscape (2010), he argued that science could determine human values. In Free Will (2012), he denied the existence of choice but still insisted that ethics required intellectual honesty. And in Lying (2011)—a slim, absolutist volume—he declared that honesty was a moral imperative. Not just generally, but always. “By lying,” he wrote, “we deny our friends access to reality—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate.”

That was the stance: honesty above all. No white lies or “strategic omissions.” Almost. Harris carved out—thank you!—an “Anne Frank” exception, when the truth leads to atrocity. Nazis (real Nazis) banging on your door is quite the exception.

Then came COVID. And the 2020 election. In 2022, Harris justified burying truth about Hunter Biden, when the truth might cause a vote he didn’t like. Hardly an atrocity, by any stretch. The point here is not how to square this circle by finding out how to make desired political outcomes fit Anne Frank. It’s that there’s a lurking contradiction in the heart of his early morally charged exhortations.

If you are harboring Anne Frank in your attic and the Nazis come to the door, and they ask if you have any Jews in your house, the fact that you would lie—and, indeed, should lie—does not suggest that lying is generally acceptable.
—Harris, Lying, 2011

Lying is, as we all sometimes know, not “generally” acceptable. But most of the world runs on lies that qualify under the rubric of prudential considerations, which aren’t atrocities but can become them very soon if we’re dumb enough to tell the truth. Let’s continue along this sad path of the unraveling of an entire philosophy.

COVID really hit hard. And whomever was to be president that Harris didn’t like. Suddenly, Harris decided that some things were too important to talk about. He went silent on vaccine tradeoffs. He refused to engage dissenting views on his podcast. And in an August 2022 appearance on the Triggered podcast, he said something extraordinary: “It doesn't even matter if Hunter Biden had the corpses of children in his basement—I would not have cared.” Because in his view, the only acceptable outcome was defeating Donald Trump. And if that meant suppressing the laptop story, so be it.

Blurting this out in a moment of philosophical dysphoria did put the smell of blood in the water for his critics. But most people still don’t see what he did. He contradicted literally everything he was saying before. Full stop. I’m amazed. I really am, and I really must be.

Lying wasn’t a loose case against deception but a categorical scream from the mountain top one. I found myself anxious, even guilty, trying to engineer mechanical perfection in truth-telling, until I realized the entire world doesn’t work that way. And unlike Sam’s bizarro fantasy, we’d all be fucked if it did. I’m sure many of his readers took on board his puritanical and philosophically shined stance and did some moral recalibration. Harris argued that lying—even with good intentions—leads to unintended consequences. He announced triumphantly that deception for the "greater good" inevitably erodes trust, distorts perception, and builds systems that can no longer correct themselves.

Bro. Read this.

The unintended consequence of Harris’s obsession with unintended consequences is that his cure creates the very disease he fears. If lying breeds chaos, so does truth-telling in the wrong contexts. Honesty can be just as destabilizing as deception, which means prudence, not absolutism, has to govern.

But in 2020, when the outcome really mattered to him, he violated that very logic. The problem is, he didn’t, like most of us might, make a one-time exception in extraordinary times. He revealed something more devastating: that his absolutism about truth was always riding on unspoken caveats. The pragmatic impulse was there all along. He just hadn’t been cornered into admitting it.

Harris still hasn’t addressed the contradiction. Readers and viewers of his podcast (I count myself among them) would search in vain for a way to square Harris’s circle. It’s clear to me that he simply didn’t think through the consequences of his own position. The way to square Harris’s circle is that he never believed what he said before. The mistake here is a fundamental tension in what he once proposed, and frankly it’s a contradiction at the heart of his philosophy. Don’t hold your breath for the revised edition of Lying or clarification of what now counts as morally acceptable deception. Harris just said shit he didn’t really believe—or thought he believed until he was challenged by reality, which is the only reason we lie or don’t in the first place. Ay. Reality.

I’m a former defense contractor and without clearance I can only generate more smoke than fire about that world. But we all know enough already. Let’s put up his celebrated Lying to anything real. Perhaps telling your spouse he or she looks fine and great when you don’t believe it will create later complexities (but how?). Protecting a nation, or anything for that matter, is a different order of moral calculation entirely. Compare his Kantian puritanical vision—or fantasy, turns out—to the world of intelligence and national security, domains where deception isn’t a moral failure, it’s a professional requirement.

CIA officers lie to protect state secrets, secure lives, and manage long-term risk. The best ones do so with full awareness of the ethical weight involved. They know that lying represents more of a minefield than the philosopher’s slippery slope. The difference is: they don’t pretend otherwise. For that matter, nearly everyone in a position of responsibility and authority has to lie to protect the people who rely on him or her.

During World War II, Allied intelligence created an elaborate deception campaign known as Operation Fortitude. From the start, it was a giant lie. The Allies wanted the Nazis to believe the D-Day invasion would hit Pas-de-Calais instead of Normandy. They staged fake armies with rubber tanks, planted false radio traffic, and sent double agents to feed Hitler misinformation. It worked: German troops stayed pinned at Calais long after the real invasion had begun. That single lie—coordinated, deliberate, strategic—saved tens of thousands of lives and probably shortened the war. Did it avert an atrocity? Impossible to know. But still—the fuckers went to the wrong place.

Anne Frank is a useful example for grad students and Sam. But what about the conditions that keep universities and philosophy departments safe in the first place? Are we really prepared to say our leaders shouldn’t spy, when spying itself is, by definition, a form of strategic lying for the greater good?

How long could Harris—or the rest of us for that matter—live happily with his family in Los Angeles if the nation itself was put in jeopardy because we managed to have the only intelligence apparatus in the history of nations that “could not tell a lie”? His vision was clearly bullshit, though it may make a certain sense for situations of far less importance and scope, like your relations with friends and family. Not a very far-reaching philosophy, bro.

Harris is committed to treating every lie as if it predictably spirals into atrocity. But in practice, we rarely know outcomes in advance. Most lies are judged against uncertain futures, not guaranteed horrors. That’s the terrain where real moral calculation actually takes place—and where his absolutism evaporates.

Let’s unpack this, because his internal contradiction is alarmingly teeth-shattering and nearly impossible to dismiss if thinking about it for more than a few seconds. What makes Harris’s position so brittle is that for years, he insisted that any compromise with the truth was cowardice. But when confronted with a scenario whose outcome emotionally mattered to him, he folded. I don’t know how else to say it, and as I mentioned, I often enjoy Sam. I even think (still) he's smart. But I can’t bring myself to say that it was particularly thoughtful, his sudden Alzheimer’s about his 2011 book, and frankly I didn’t sense much soul-searching.

It’s this weird lack of self-awareness and shame that fascinated me about Harris and now sometimes repels me. As if the stakes finally gave him permission to say what he once condemned: that outcomes justify means. He made, in those “troubled years” that should have tested his theory but instead unraveled it, a stark argument that he himself was full of shit—by his own principles. This is a man who deserves a slap on the back.

The failure of prudence is itself a moral tragedy. And Sam seems to have rediscovered prudence, but only after telling the world it didn’t matter.

I like Sam Harris. I’m even a fan, in some constrained sense. But if your entire philosophy rests on truth-telling, and you later say truth no longer applies when the stakes are high, then you never believed what you claimed in the first place.

Being a public intellectual for decades is no doubt difficult. But walking straight into a contradiction this fundamental, and never reckoning with it, is hard to ignore.

— Erik J. Larson