The Empathy Standard


It appears that if you're a Republican member of the judiciary committee, empathy is a bad thing. Empathy, in their mind, is equivalent to bias and partiality, and well we wouldn't want anyone on the court with "bias" or "partiality" -- unless, of course, it's our kind of "bias" and "partiality."

Supreme Court nominee, a Latina woman who has been on federal courts for 17 years, and was appointed to the Federal bench by George H.W. Bush, and thus has a fairly long judicial record to consider, is being questioned primarily about her "wise Latina woman" statement. Now, yesterday, she admitted upfront that it was a poor choice of words, and that as a judge she always sticks to the law.

But, back to empathy. Barack Obama has set out what he has called the empathy standard. Empathy means, according to the dictionary:

n. the power of entering into another's personality and imaginatively experiencing his experiences: the power of entering into the feeling or spirit of something (esp. a work of art) and so appreciating it full." (Chambers 20th Century Dictionary. New Edition. Cambridge University Press, 1983).

So, what does it mean to have empathy? As I understand the definition, it means the ability to walk in the other person's shoes, to understand what their situation is, so as to better understand the situation. Back during the election, we were told that Barack Obama was an elitist, an ivory tower sort of person. Now, that we've gotten his first nominee, we're told that we don't want someone with life experience, that has the ability to walk in the shoes of another. No, we want an ivory tower type, one who won't be affected by the realities of life. Or so, I seem to hear from the rhetoric on the right.

Laurie Patton, a religious studies professor, writing in Religion Dispatches, speaks of the academic world's search for a balance between empathy and critique. She thinks if religion scholars can find this balance, so can Senators or Justices.


Both [Robert] Orsi and [Russell] McCutcheon take provocative positions in order to correct what they perceive as intellectual imbalances in the study of religions. But most scholars of religion today operate in this middle ground that [Thomas] Tweed so adeptly describes, and intuitively know that empathy and critique are part and parcel of the same imaginative task. Empathy, for them, is not a dirty word, nor is it a word signifying prejudice in the process of seemingly objective analysis. It is simply the capacity to imagine another’s position while reserving the right to come to one’s own judgment on the subject. Through open and engaging debate, scholars of religion have made some important progress when it comes to the word empathy.

And if scholars can do this when thinking about religion, surely senators can do this when thinking about the law. Most of us misuse words in everyday speech, and most of us would do well to consult a dictionary every now and then. But here we are witnessing the blatant distortion of a word’s meaning for political purposes—nothing new, to be sure, but certainly sad and striking coming from the mouths of our elected officials who claim to care about the judiciousness of the judiciary.


It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out. Politics is clearly playing its role -- as is to be expected. There is a desire on the part of some Republicans to tar Obama as an extremist at every point so as to attract the independent/moderate voter. I don't think this will do the trick. Sotomayor's judicial record is quite mainstream. And, if Republicans are afraid that the court will somehow go liberal, remember that there is a strong conservative majority on the court. Sotomayor will simply step into the shoes of David Souter, himself a GOP nominee.

So, what is wrong with empathy? Why is having the ability to get into the shoes of another a bad thing? My expectation is that a good judge will try to get a sense of both parties -- through empathy. Empathy, as Dr. Patton reminds us, is not the same thing as sympathy (something the GOP Senators seem unable to understand).

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