Usually, when politics and science start mixing, I usually want to bang my head with a blunt object when I hear how absolutely asinine the arguments are. However, over at Reason’s Hit and Run blog, Ronald Bailey writes intelligently about how neuroscience is confirming Adam Smith’s theory of human morality which he used as the basis for his free market economic theory.

Adam Smith linked human morality to our ability to have empathy, which is the ability to directly feel the emotions of another person. He made the assumption that when observing someone else’s emotions, we can only feel what we think we ourselves would feel in that situation:

However, Smith realizes that human empathy has its limits:

This is basically saying that humans can empathize with others when an emotion is expressed locally to us. Or as Joseph Stalin put it, “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.” When put in general, abstract terms, emotions are not felt the same way to ordinary humans. Our minds have not evolved yet to experience emotions as Obi-Wan Kenobi does in Star Wars when he says, “A great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced…” when the planet Alderaan was destroyed. For the rest of us, we feel emotions when things are made personal and we see the suffering or joy of another individual.

Adam Smith observed this aspect of human nature and realized that a prosperous economic system could not contradict human nature. Many interpret the free market system to glorify selfishness, seeing it as ‘I’ll get mine, and screw the rest of you’ type of system. However, it was this keen observation of human empathy that makes the free market system work. It is not in human nature to have empathy for everyone in abstract terms. So, a centrally-planned government cannot possibly have the compassion that individuals have for those around them.

By just observing the recent events, this is clearly evident. Take FEMA and the Katrina Hurricane debacle, for example. The badly managed bureaucracy by Michael Brown failed spectacularly to help those most in need. The utter lack of compassion and concern for the seriousness of the situation was apparent from the emails that Brown sent in the immediate aftermath of the storm. Contrast that to any private organization, such as the Red Cross who’s mission is “The American Red Cross is where people mobilize to help their neighbors—across the street, across the country, and across the world—in emergencies.” However, they were barred from even entering the city in the aftermath.

Now neuroscience is backing up these human morality claims with recent studies being done. Recently, mirror neurons have been discovered in the brain. These neurons literally mirror the same response in their brains as to what the individual perceives to be happening in another’s brain. In this way, the individual is trying read that person’s mind. The neuroscientists are claiming:

How advanced these mirror neuron systems are in individuals would obviously limit how well people empathize with others. That same article talks about how a deficiency in this area for autism sufferers would explain their inability to understand the mental states others and communicate.

So it may be possible that certain individuals may now or in the future have extraordinary abilities to empathize with even abstract concepts of emotions of others. However, until we can be sure that Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi are running the centrally-planned bureaucracies, then the local government, free market approach to problem solving seems to make the most sense.