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… Harris is a multi-topic public intellectual, unaffiliated with any university, and independently minded. The famously militant New Atheist, bestselling author, advocate of Buddhist meditation, neuroscience PhD, podcaster, app developer, and much-criticized critic of radical Islam agrees with Sapolsky that jettisoning belief in free will would be good for both society and the individual. Harris—who looks like a cross between Spock and a dour, karate-chopping Ben Stiller—writes that “losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.”
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While Sapolsky’s and Harris’s predictions about a world after denial are quasi-utopian, the science does not appear to back up their sunny speculations. “Believe it or not,” I said to Kelly at tea, “scientists have run experiments in this domain”—lab experiments to discover the psychological effect of denying free will on the person denying it. It’s not long been the subject of empirical study, however. In one of the first papers, published in 2008, behavioral economist Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota’s business school, and Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, found that when test subjects are primed with anti-free-will belief (by reading a passage denying free will in Francis Crick’s book The Astonishing Hypothesis), they cheat and steal during real-money lab games in greater percentages than subjects in the control group.
Nearly all the other results in this line of research run counter to Sapolsky’s and Harris’s rosy predictions. Reading dozens of journal articles, I learned that disbelief in free will causes dishonest, selfish, aggressive, and conforming behavior; reduces helpfulness; hampers learning from one’s misdeeds; curtails thinking for oneself; diminishes recycling; lowers expectations for occupational success; and decreases quality of job performance.
“What the fuck’s ‘recycling’ doing in there?” Kelly asked, in a moment of apparent lalochezia. I wondered silently what she might have been so upset about that she needed the pressure release of swearing. “Well,” I said slowly, accusingly, drawing out the vowel, “Wehhhhl, experimental moral psychology has an unavoidable dollhouse nature.” The lab can only be a simulacrum of real life’s moral dilemmas. While researchers may want to test a belief’s contribution to bad behavior, universities’ institutional review boards, thankfully, do not allow actual harm to come to the participants in these studies. Similarly, good, heroic, or praiseworthy behavior must have a stand-in, which is what recycling is doing in there. To test if an experimentally manipulated condition contributes to aggressive behavior, a number of studies have adopted the strategy of giving participants the opportunity to clandestinely drench another person’s food in hot sauce. And, you guessed it, participants primed with free-will disbelief administer more hot sauce, i.e., were more aggressive, than controls. The vast majority of the science around the psychological effects of denying free will seems to militate against the optimists and in favor of the pessimists. Who’s right
There’s actually a third position. In the recent intellectual conversation around free-will denial, three mutually inconsistent schools of thought have developed. On the one hand, there’s Sapolsky and Harris, the optimists, who think denial would rid the world of moral harms that are presently dependent on free-will credence; on the other hand, empirical research seems to show that not believing in free will has negative effects on our behavior and psychology; while, on the third hand—and this position is as strange as a third hand—there are those who say free will is an illusion but that the effects of disbelief would be so detrimental that this knowledge should be suppressed. Yes, that’s right, some philosophers and scientists who deny free will’s existence don’t think it would be wise to let everyone know the truth. As Vohs and Schooler write: “If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.”
They’re not just trying to justify their grant money with a practical upshot for their research. They categorize the falsity of free will as an “informational existential threat,” like the knowledge of how to build a nuclear bomb or make smallpox into an aerosol. The knowledge that free will is an illusion must be possessed only—the thinking goes—by a small elite who, supposedly, will be strong enough to resist the bad effects. Suppressionists never say nobody should know this truth. How could they, since they know it? I imagine there must be a certain frisson to making an exception for oneself precisely here. The physicist Paul Davies, writing in an essay commissioned by—of all places—Foreign Affairs, says free will is “a fiction worth maintaining,” and denial “is the world’s most dangerous idea.”
It’s not new, this moral panic. Catastrophizing about free-will denial goes way back. But today, it is not mere idle speculation, which it was in 1524, when Erasmus argued for free will against Martin Luther’s denial. Erasmus worried that the common man was too “weak, ignorant, and wicked” to handle what Luther was proposing. Therefore, Luther ought not to say it. But Erasmus did not seriously contemplate Luther’s denial becoming widespread, so his worries were merely abstract pearl-clutching—and self-serving to boot. Erasmus should have felt the bite of intellectual conscience, the pull of a certain epistemological scruple. Because it was in Erasmus’ time—and still should be in ours—a principle recognized by all truth-seekers that one cannot silence one’s interlocutor in a debate by asserting that merely uttering their conclusion would cause harm. It’s akin to ad hominem, as it does not address the issue on its merits (i.e., on the question of whether it’s true or not). Furthermore, it would preclude the discovery of harmful truths; for, indeed, some truths are harmful.
Today’s suppressionism is different because Erasmus believed in free will. These days, recommending suppression is most interesting (and most ethical) when it’s a move made by deniers, i.e., the thinker in Luther’s position. Suppressionist scientists are advocating for the sequestration of their own research. They argue that, if we really and truly believe “the un-free will” (a translation of Luther’s 1525 title) to be dangerous knowledge, then it should be “born classified,” as is the case now for developmental research for new nuclear weaponry. “Perhaps the government could,” I joked with Kelly at the next tea, “in the vein of UFOs, attempt to discredit as a kook anyone who proclaims the dangerous and secret truth that we don’t have free will.”
Thankfully, outright deception may not be necessary. “We are fortunately deceived about free will,” writes Saul Smilansky, professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa, in Israel, and the foremost academic proponent of letting the illusion be. In Plato scholarship, an elite promulgating a falsehood to maintain social order is called a “noble lie.”
A noble lie affirming free will may not be necessary, since few people see their way to the arguments for denial, and most, when the arguments are brought to their attention, do not accept their implications anyway—even when they cannot gainsay the logic. Smilansky worries that graduate students, working under the conviction that free will is false, will become depressed or psychotic post-disillusionment. So he discourages PhD students from working with him. He writes, “We must protect humanity in the hothouse of illusion from the chill of the ultimate perspective.” “I like that,” I remarked to Kelly. “The icy chill of the ultimate perspective.”
Adopting the ultimate perspective without illusions would be to cross one more threshold in the ongoing diminishment of human metaphysical dignity, which includes a familiar list: Copernicus decentering the Earth and us with it; Darwinism making us animal and accidental; Nietzsche and Freud dethroning self-transparent consciousness and foregrounding the unruly unconscious. It’s another instance of borrowed by Joan Didion to describe the ostensibly utopian world of 1968 Haight-Ashbury as, instead, an apocalyptic nightmare. Analogously, free-will denial is seen by some as utopian and by others as catastrophic. The latter think it would cause societal collapse, which must be prevented by a paternalistic noble lie. The former, like Sapolsky and Harris, think the ultimate perspective would yield an egalitarian, socially just, quasi-heavenly sublime, if only we could get people to adopt it. “No one would deserve to be treated any better or any worse than anyone else,” as Sapolsky writes. When I shared that quotation with Kelly at tea, it struck me that denial seems to rhyme with progressive politics. Because, for example, it is the positive belief in free will that allows some people (usually on the political right wing) to blame poverty on the freely made bad decisions of the poor, rather than on structural causes, which, by comparison, play a deterministic role. Also, many of the societal changes that progressives want to see are logical implications of free-will denial, including prison reform and intervention to prevent childhood poverty, to name only those on Sapolsky’s short list.
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“The progressive-aligned cause Sapolsky is most passionate about in his books,” Kelly replied, “is government intervention to prevent all childhood poverty.” Why? Because it’s unfair what the stress of being poor does to the developing brain. Poor people, according to research by Sapolsky and others, have chronically high levels of glucocorticoids—“Like low-ranking baboons,” I interrupted mischievously—with adverse effects on health, brain function, and behavior. Sapolsky points out that the way stress works in baboons is exactly how stress works in humans. As part of the fight-or-flight system, the stress response is incredibly ancient—it’s shared by all primates and every mammal, bird, fish, and reptile. Same chemical compounds, same interactions.
When triggered, glucocorticoids prepare a creature’s body for emergency action, shutting down systems not essential in emergencies, including digestion, reproduction, neurogenesis, and growth. (I learned there is such a thing as “stress dwarfism”—when growth is markedly stunted by chronic stress in childhood.) In animals less social than baboons and humans, stress hormones are washed away as quickly as they are triggered, as Sapolsky cleverly captured in the title of his 1994 book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. By contrast, baboons hunt, gather, and eat all the food they need each day in only a few hours, “leaving the rest of their time to make each other miserable,” Sapolsky writes. The result is chronic stress (only for some, it must be said). In adult humans, the chronic stress of poverty creates a detrimental cognitive load, diminishing the ability to focus attention, according to studies on the psychological effects of poverty. In a 2013 study by researchers at Princeton, rich and poor study participants performed equally well on standard tests of cognition while preoccupied with lab problems involving trivial amounts of money. But if the amounts were $2000, a poor person, on average, displayed a drop in cognitive function analogous to 13 IQ points, or an entire night’s sleep. Rich participants preoccupied by the $2000 scenarios averaged no drop in performance on the cognitive test.
For a child, whose brain is still developing, poverty-caused stress can spell disaster, Sapolsky says. Stress hormones adversely affect the growth of the prefrontal cortex, generating measurable effects like poorer executive function, worse emotional regulation, and deficits in impulse control. Neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of many popular books on the brain, says that poor impulse control makes sense as a factor in criminogenesis. Studies show that prison populations tend to fill out surveys with the correct answers to moral dilemmas—that is, they know right from wrong. But prisoners score below average on tests of impulse control, like the marshmallow test and others. Thereby, nonviolent economic crime, like shoplifting or burglary, would not be caused by lack of economic resources coupled with an upbringing that…
The next part, part three, of this five-part series, will arrive in your email inbox in one week. If you wish to read ahead, here’s part three now.
Update of August 2026: Newly added paragraph by paragraph summary of “Sleepwalking Toward Bethlehem,” as well as a study guide and a source list for further reading.
If a judge denies parole right before lunch, then grants parole on a nearly identical case immediately after lunch, where does the judge sit?
Behind the bench or in the cafeteria?