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. [Read more]