Sam Harris on “Life Without Free Will”

He is on top form in this one.

Here is a passage that resonates particularly strongly with my own meta-views of morality:

If we cannot assign blame to the workings of the universe, how can evil people be held responsible for their actions? In the deepest sense, it seems, they can’t be. But in a practical sense, they must be. I see no contradiction in this. In fact, I think that keeping the deep causes of human behavior in view would only improve our practical response to evil. The feeling that people are deeply responsible for who they are does nothing but produce moral illusions and psychological suffering.

Indeed. For more on these ideas ideas, see this old post which quotes liberally from an outstanding article by Frans De Waal.

Back to Harris, there's some dark humour mixed in with the profundity:

[M]y wife and I recently took our three-year-old daughter on an airplane for the first time. She loves to fly! As it happens, her joy was made possible in part because we neglected to tell her that airplanes occasionally malfunction and fall out of the sky, killing everyone on board.