Understanding, sympathy, and compassion are all synonyms for empathy. I feel your pain (said with emotion in my voice) and I bite my lip. Bill Clinton was so good at doing it. He really made you believe he meant every word. This has nothing to do with anything else but connection with the other person’s life problems. We all have some serious issues. Some are truly sad situations.
The law deals with facts not emotion and certainly not feelings. The U.S. Constitution is the basic law that governs our nation. It is the one set of rules that guides our government. It was written in 1787 and officially ratified in 1789. There is no reference to empathy in the Constitution. That document does provide rules for amendments and there have been 27 to date. None of them are about feelings. All of them define rules and regulations.
Now President Barack Obama says he wants to appoint a new Supreme Court justice that has empathy. Is he suggesting that a new member of the court ought to decide cases based upon empathy for the pleader? Does “feeling your pain” justify a different ruling than not sympathizing with someone’s dilemma? I find the idea of appointing someone to the Supreme Court based on their feelings not in accord with facts.
Can the president appoint a liberal Supreme Court judge even if he or she has no empathy? Absolutely! Liberal interpretation can be made for many things in the 21st century without empathy. Equal rights, gun control, abortion are all hot button issues that require recognition of the impact of the new technologies and greater appreciation of human behavior versus those of the 18th century.
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