Early in 2009 President Obama stated that he would use ‘empathy’ as one criterion for selecting a candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court, sparking a controversy in the media. At the press conference where he made the original announcement, he gave his criteria as: sharp and independent mind; honours the constitution; respects the judicial process; and holds the judicial values upon which the country was founded. Then he added a consideration: empathy.
He said, “I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.”
In an interview two days later, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch (Utah) said that “Usually [empathy] is a code word for an activist judge”. On the same day, radio talk show host Laura Ingraham said on Fox News:
“When we have the president of the United States out there on Friday saying that it’s going to be about empathy and understanding people from different walks of life, that is a singularly loopy idea for a qualification for a justice.”
As I’m writing a book about empathy, I would like to share these reflections:
- Our capacity to empathize is a deeply significant aspect of being human. It’s part of the ‘social glue’ that holds society together (Hoffman, 2000).
- Society has specific labels for people who don’t have the capacity to empathize: they are labelled as psychopathic, autistic etc. In ‘psychopaths’, a lack of empathy enables them to ignore their awareness of their victim’s distress. People who are diagnosed as ‘autistic’ find it difficult to understand and interact with the people around them, and are commonly thought to miss out on some of the richness of human experience.
- Would fairness be compromised in a judge who had the capacity to empathize? For instance, would such a judge favor the poor or ethnic minorities? Whether or not you believe that empathy is a fundamental value in its own right, there is evidence from a variety of sources that empathy is a actually a motive for acting morally/ethically. For example, researcher Martin Hoffman proposes that “Empathic distress functions as a prosocial moral motive” (Hoffman, 2000). Empathy is a motive for fairness, not a hindrance to it.
I wonder if the controversy has arisen as a result of a misunderstanding of the meaning of empathy? If empathy is defined as ‘feeling what the other person is feeling’, then I would be concerned about Obama using empathy as a criterion. Like Orrin Hatch and Laura Ingraham, I would be concerned about a lack of impartiality. However, I do not define empathy in this way, and I believe that Obama doesn’t either. I define empathy as sensing the other’s feelings and their deeper motivations, their ‘needs’.
Extracted from ‘Empathy: From the Buddha to Obama’, by Chris Warren(Shantigarbha), forthcoming.
Reference:
Hoffman, M. L. (2000). Empathy and Moral Development. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
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