We’ll have a new pres­i­dent one year from today. Happy neg­a­tive anniversary!

A man got to have a code. —Omar, The Wire.

One of the cen­tral tenets of the New Athe­ist pro­gram lately being ped­dled by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Den­nett, Sam Harris, et al., is that ratio­nal athe­ism does not entail moral nihilism. But what hap­pens when sci­en­tists, work­ing in the new field of moral psy­chol­ogy, find out that our moral think­ing depends less on reason than it does on naturally-​selected instinct?

Steven Pinker, in a long essay in this week’s New York Times Mag­a­zine, rec­og­nizes the threat:

“Morally cor­ro­sive” is exactly the term that some crit­ics would apply to the new sci­ence of the moral sense. The attempt to dis­sect our moral intu­itions can look like an attempt to debunk them…. The whole enter­prise seems to be drag­ging us to an amoral nihilism, in which moral­ity itself would be demoted from a tran­scen­dent prin­ci­ple to a fig­ment of our neural circuitry.

Pinker thinks that he can save the appear­ances, but his solu­tions aren’t very con­vinc­ing.

If taxes aren’t your thing, at least take a break from the elec­tions with this, which might as well be one of David Simon’s rejected story ideas:

After Mr. Cin­tron recently died, Mr. O’Hare, 65, and another friend, David Daloia, also 65, whose last known address was in Queens, tried, with­out suc­cess, to cash a Social Secu­rity check of Mr. Cintron’s, the police say. They real­ized that they needed their dead buddy’s help.

So on Tues­day after­noon, the police say, they dressed Mr. Cintron’s corpse, car­ried him down a flight of stairs and heaved his body into a com­puter chair with wheels. Out­side, they rolled him over the uneven side­walk, pulling the chair toward Pay-O-Matic, a check-​cashing shop on Ninth Avenue.

But as the men turned the corner, trying to steady the floppy corpse, they ran into the law.

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