Sam Harris Taught Me to Spot Motivated Reasoning. Then He Did It.
I Still Respect Sam Harris. That’s Why I’m Writing This.
Johan spent years as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer working across Europe, Middle East, and beyond. He now writes about geopolitics, behavioral economics, and the cost of motivated reasoning.
This is a response to Sam Harris’s recent piece, “Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel.” I recommend reading it first.
I respect Sam Harris. I have read his work, followed it for years, and found his application of moral philosophy to difficult questions genuinely useful. I still do. This is not a repudiation. It is a critique, which is a different thing, and which I think Sam Harris Harris himself would insist deserves to be made clearly.
My framework is simple and I have stated it many times. Suffering is suffering. Injustice is injustice. Neither requires a passport, a religion, a flag, or a history to qualify. A child in Gaza and a child in Tel Aviv weigh identically on any moral scale worth using. A civilian killed by a Hamas rocket and a civilian killed by an IDF airstrike are the same category of fact. If your framework produces different weights depending on who is doing the killing and who is absorbing it, you do not have a framework. You have a team. I apply this standard without exception, which means it sometimes produces conclusions that cost me readers on the left and conclusions that cost me readers on the right. That is not a problem. That is the point.
Harris recently published a piece explaining why he will not debate critics of Israel. He is entitled to that choice. But the piece raises a problem that has nothing to do with Israel, Gaza, Hamas, or October 7th. It raises a problem with his method. And method is where Harris has staked his entire intellectual identity.
The problem is this: the piece applies two different philosophical frameworks to the two sides of the same conflict, without acknowledging the switch, and then presents the result as a principled conclusion.
When Harris analyzes Hamas, he reasons consequentially. He counts outcomes: the tunnels, the human shields, the culture of martyrdom, the polls showing continued popularity after catastrophic losses. He asks what the evidence produces. This is correct methodology. Consequences matter. Revealed preference matters.
But when Harris analyzes Israel, he switches registers entirely. The founding is legitimate. The right to exist is categorical. The historical record is declared irrelevant, a “fool’s errand” not worth examining. Intent is elevated over outcome. The ethical difference between the two sides is, in his framing, so vast that no accumulation of Israeli conduct can close it unless Israel’s behavior becomes literally equivalent to its enemies. That threshold is not consequentialist reasoning. That is a deontological protection applied to one party only.
You cannot do both. A consistent consequentialist asks the same question of every actor: what are the actual outcomes, and who bears them? A consistent deontologist asks: what principles apply, and do they apply universally? Harris is doing neither. He is applying consequentialism to Hamas and deontology to Israel, selecting the framework that produces the preferred answer on each side, and calling the product his honest reckoning. This is what motivated reasoning looks like when it is wearing a philosopher’s coat.
When the Method Stops Where It Should Cost You
The Yemen passage is the most instructive moment in the piece. Harris deploys it correctly, I think, to expose a genuine moral asymmetry in global attention. The suffering in Yemen is real. The silence around it relative to Gaza is real. The disparity demands an explanation, and antisemitism is part of one.
He is right to raise it.
But he does not follow the logic. If disproportionate global focus on Israeli conduct is evidence of antisemitic distortion, then disproportionate global indifference to non-Israeli suffering, including Palestinian suffering under blockade for seventeen years, would by the same method be evidence of something else. He stops the argument exactly where it would cost him something. A method that only cuts in one direction is not a method. It is a conclusion with scaffolding.
A note on consistency: the test of a principle is not whether it holds when it is easy. It is whether it holds when it embarrasses you.
A geopolitical note, because Harris presents himself as analytically serious about the region and I spent years working in it professionally.
The piece is thin on actual geopolitics. It is heavy on civilizational framing, the deep structural clash between liberal democracy and militant Islam, and light on the mechanisms: the funding networks, the strategic interests of regional states, the ways occupation generates the very radicalism it claims to suppress, the role of the Gulf monarchies he gestures toward but does not examine, the Israeli domestic political economy of permanent conflict. These are not exotic considerations. They are the basic architecture of the situation. Civilizational framing is not analysis. It is the thing you reach for when you want to stop analyzing.
None of this means Harris is wrong about Hamas. He is not wrong about Hamas. A movement that uses its own civilian population as a strategic instrument is morally accountable for the consequences of that choice. That can be stated plainly, and it should be.
But a first-principles framework does not grant exemptions. The first principle is reducing suffering, without exception, with no discount for which passport the person carries or which side’s conduct generated the headline. Either that principle applies universally or it is not a principle. It is a flag.
Harris has spent decades warning his readers about exactly this failure. Motivated reasoning. Special pleading. The tribe doing your thinking and calling the output conviction. He is right about all of it. He is right about it in the abstract, in the writings, in the podcasts. He is right about it when it applies to everyone else.
The test of a framework is whether it holds when it costs you something. When it embarrasses your side. When the principle produces a conclusion your audience does not want.
That is the test. Harris built his reputation on passing it.
I still think he can.
🐌
Why the snail?
Because it moves slowly and leaves a clear trail.
You can always see exactly where it has been and how it got there.
That is the only kind of thinking worth doing.
🐌
Johan, thank you for this reflection.
What stayed with me after reading was not so much the specific argument about Sam Harris, but the broader question of how difficult it is for any of us to remain consistent when our moral principles encounter the complexity of lived reality.
I often find myself wondering whether motivated reasoning is less a failure of intelligence and more a reflection of our deep attachment to particular narratives. We all carry stories about who we are, who belongs, who is threatening, who is victimized, and what justice requires. Those stories help us navigate the world, but they can also narrow our field of vision in ways that are difficult to recognize from within.
The older I get, the less interested I become in determining which side is guilty of motivated reasoning and the more interested I become in understanding the conditions that make all human beings vulnerable to it.
What seems especially challenging in conflicts marked by profound trauma is that suffering itself can become tribalized. Compassion begins to flow unevenly. Historical wounds become selective lenses. The suffering of some people becomes vivid while the suffering of others fades into the background. Yet if there is any moral principle worth holding onto, it may be the one you point toward: suffering is suffering.
I do not mean that context, history, intent, or power are irrelevant. They matter enormously. But they matter within a larger moral framework that refuses to place different values on human lives.
Reading your piece left me reflecting on how difficult genuine self-examination is, particularly when the conclusions threaten our identities, communities, or cherished beliefs. Perhaps intellectual integrity is not the absence of bias, but a continual willingness to notice when our principles are becoming contingent on who is involved.
In that sense, the challenge you raise is one that extends far beyond this particular conflict. It is a challenge for all of us.
I quit listening to Sam Harris a few years ago. I felt a disconnect between what he said and what he believed. Much of our reasoning is subconscious.
Then, on one of his podcasts, he was addressing health care worker burnout. He said something like, “Healthcare workers need to learn the difference between sympathy and empathy. They should be sympathetic rather than empathetic.
That is when I understood what bothered me about Sam Harris. Empathy is instinctive. It has to do with mirror neurons and physiology I won’t go into here. Sympathy can be pretended.
An intelligent sociopathic opportunist knows what to say and how to act to appear to have feelings like normal people. I will say no more.
I appreciated your critique. I would say more, but my grandchildren spent the night and are waking up. Take care.