Jonathan Haidt, a professor at the University of Virginia and author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, found that conservatives could more readily put themselves in the shoes of liberals and understand morally where they were coming from. The reverse was not true of liberals. They have little understanding of those with opposing views to their own...
Why are liberals unable to sympathize with conservatives? I offer three possibilities. First, I often wonder if this “blind spot” for conservatives is similar to the psychopath who cannot comprehend the morality of those who are “normal.”
The crucial question in evaluating Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court justice is not whether, but how, she relies on empathy or emotion in rendering decisions.
People without emotions cannot make sensible decisions because they don’t know how much anything is worth. People without social emotions like empathy are not objective decision-makers. They are sociopaths who sometimes end up on death row.
When hosting Bill Bennett's "Morning in America" radio show last Friday, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said, "I don't need some justice up there feeling bad for my opponent because of their life circumstances or their condition and shortchanging me and my opportunity to get fair treatment under the law … I'll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind."
I recently suggested that Justice Sam Alito's lonely dissent in the Phelps First Amendment case seemed to embody the "empathy standard" for judicial review, the very standard that Republicans warned about in the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Over the weekend, Emily Bazelon made a similar observation in a provocative piece for The New York Times Magazine. In it, she called Alito "the closest thing conservatives have to a feelings justice" and said that, in his opinions, "we get a window onto right-wing empathy on this court."
by John Paul Rollert Lecturer in Business Ethics and Leadership, Harvard Extension School
Last year, when President Obama called empathy "an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes," Sessions was downright perplexed. "I don't know what empathy means," he confessed, though that didn't stop him from calling the President's comments "dangerous" and assailing them in the Sotomayor hearings.
"In my view such a philosophy is disqualified," he said, "Such an approach to judging means that the umpire calling the game is not neutral, but instead feels empowered to favor one team over another."
by John Paul Rollert Teacher, leadership and business ethics at Harvard Summer School
In just 10 days, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan will almost certainly face questions about the notion of "empathy" and its role in judicial decision-making. In her first appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republicans will likely use the topic to try to portray Kagan as a wuss who will put personal sympathies ahead of jurisprudence. Democrats on the panel will mention it to try to portray her as a compassionate jurist who won't lose sight of the human stories behind the legal standards and rules.
Republicans had a field day when the president said that "empathy" was an important attribute for a Supreme Court nominee. But as recent cases argued before the court prove, lives are at stake. Empathy is essential.
What is empathy? Is this your personal feeling that you had a tough childhood or some prejudice that you have--you are a Protestant or a Catholic or your ethnicity or your race or some bias you brought with you to life and to the court? Is that what an empathy is? Well, it has no objective meaning, and that is why it is not a legal standard. The oath of ``impartiality'' to ``equal justice to the rich and the poor alike'' is violated when such things infect the decision making process.
Conservatives and liberals are sharply divided on Obama's pledge to tout empathy in selection of Supreme Court justices.
How does President Obama spell "empathy"? S-C-O-T-U-S. That's insider lingo for the Supreme Court of the United States, and with an impending vacancy on the high court, people on both ends of the political spectrum have begun reading into Obama's views on the subject.
The Supreme Cout it was the topic of the day Friday when Obama surprised the White House press corps by interrupting Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' briefing with word he'd just spoken with Justice David Souter about his plans to retire at the end of the court's term in June.
"He has to explain what he meant by judging," Sotomayor said. "Judges can’t explain what’s in their heart — the job of a judge is to apply wthe law. It’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases, it’s the law."
Conservative jurists are just as guilty of displaying the soft touch -- it's just reserved for those with money and power.
The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor is sure to touch off a partisan battle over what has come to be known as President Barack Obama's "empathy standard" for nominating judges. In a speech to Planned Parenthood in 2007, Obama codified his desire for a Supreme Court justice who would have some idea of what life is like for the unfortunate. "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom,'' Obama said.
He says he wants someone who will use empathy--empathy to certain groups to decide cases. That may sound nice, but empathy toward one is prejudice toward the other, is it not? There are always litigants on the other side, and they deserve to have their cases decided on the law. And whatever else empathy might be, it is not law. So I think empathy as a standard, preference as a standard is contrary to the judicial oath. This is what a judge declares when they take the office:
Obama's empathy criteria for a supreme court nominee is wrongly criticized. Empathy is the basis for judgment and wisdom, not bias.
Well, people, it looks like the fight over the “e-word” has started again. Remember last year, when President Obama said that the capacity for empathy was an important criteria for selecting a Supreme Court nominee? He was quickly attacked by those who apparently heard “empathy” as a code word for some kind of ideological bias. And shortly after, Obama backed off from using the term
The New York Times reports that President Obama is avoiding the word empathy as he picks his second Supreme Court nominee. And who can blame him, considering comments such a this from former Bush 43 adviser Ed Gillespie: “Empathy’s a great trait in a drinking buddy, but not so much a Supreme Court justice.”
But does the E-word really deserve all of this focus? Shouldn’t the priority be finding a Supreme Court justice who isn’t, say, corruptible or mendacious?
I’ve posted numerous times before about the need for critical thinkers to practice intellectual empathy — the ability and willingness to examine issues from others’ viewpoints in a fair and open-minded manner. A person who fails to practice intellectual empathy often unfairly mischaracterizes an opposing viewpoint .
In this Pajamas Media article, Helen Smith tries to offer advice to conservatives for how to deal with the left’s lack of intellectual empathy.
Media figures and outlets have falsely suggested that President Obama said that he will seek a replacement for Justice David Souter who demonstrates the quality of "empathy" rather than a commitment to follow the law. In fact, in that statement Obama said that his nominee will demonstrate both.
Elena Kagan’s problem is not that she has too much empathy but that she has too little. President Obama famously made “that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles” his key qualification for a seat on the Supreme Court. What little we know of Ms. Kagan’s record demonstrates that she does not meet even that nebulous standard.
Empathy would require that Ms. Kagan place herself in the position of the “despised and downtrodden,” as her mentor Justice Thurgood Marshall put it. And who could possibly be more despised than a United States Army officer assigned to recruiting duties at Harvard Law School?
With midterm elections four months away, Republicans criticized Obama's philosophy of judicial empathy, an idea the administration first posed last year when the president nominated Sonya Sotomayor to the nation's high court. GOP senators expressed concerns about what they see as Kagan's liberal legal agenda, paving the way for contentious questioning that will continue this week before the committee.
Must an increase in empathy signal a decrease in law? Let us consider, for a moment, that someone has wronged you by stealing your car.
When the person is caught by police, you have the option to press charges, but then you discover that your neighbor -- whose wife is dying from cancer, after they both lost their jobs -- stole your car out of desperation to rush to meet her in the hospital, since he thought she was about to die.
Making a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room after speaking with Souter by phone, Obama told reporters he hopes to have a new justice in place for the start of the court's next term in October, a timeline that aides said would require a nomination to be sent to the Senate by June or July.
The president praised Souter, 69, as a "fair-minded and independent judge" and said he would nominate a replacement who both respects the Constitution and brings "empathy" and "understanding" to the bench.
empathy is a necessary ingredient for any successful professional. Professional is best understood as a commitment to core values and their consistent application. In fact, the lack of empathy, and the demonizing of judicial activism, appear to indicate a belief in the worst type of law, what is called "black letter law." Stemming from a belief in progress and technology, our culture has in many ways adopted a notion of objective knowledge that is not time, culture and individually bound.,...
Empathy is absolutely necessary for an effective professional. Empathy united with knowledge of and a commitment to community qua constitutional values drives informed and just law making. Similarly, Judicial activism per se is not a problem and is part of the nature of a common law based system of community justice. Activism that is not tied to knowledge, values and an understanding of the situation involved is indeed a problem.
By Lawrence F. Keller, Associate Professor, Cleveland State University
Opponents of the “Empathy Doctrine” argue that judges should not be agents of social change; that they should do as little as possible; or that everything we need to know is already in the Constitution. But the belief behind Obama’s philosophy is that no matter how constructionist or originalist or formalist a judge claims to be, he or she necessarily involves his or her specific, biased judgment. Judges, in other words, are human.
Moreover, our legal system was created by decades of humans with decades of biases. This is what Wendy Long misses in her stunningly oblivious condemnation of Sotomayor as “a liberal activist of the first order who thinks...that one’s sex, race and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.”
If you watched the Elena Kagan Supreme Court nomination hearings last week, you might have concluded that the ideal Supreme Court justice is a robot or a computer. Republican senators denounced judicial "empathy" (even as they confused it with sympathy or bias), and Kagan pledged to put aside all personal views in deference to the "law", which, she implied, was a clearly definable force for pure objectivity.
No one challenged the assumption that the ideal justice is one who puts aside all of his or her personal experiences and human qualities in the pursuit of neutrally applying clearly objective law.
On Hannity, Newt Gingrich forwarded the false conservative talking point that President Obama said he would seek a justice who shows "empathy" rather than a commitment to follow the law. But Obama actually said his nominee will do both.
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