With the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings winding down, this subject might be a little passé, but I figure that since she'll be around for a long time to come, until she's officially confirmed it's worth discussing. And, it's a good issue for me to use to slide back into the MyDD community after a busy absence. Here then is a defense of Barack Obama's desire to see "empathy" on the federal bench, presenting at least six instances when it would seem empathy would be necessary for a sound legal decision. Adapted from a post on my personal blog originally titled "In Defense of Empathy and Wise Latinas."

It is important to understand that empathy is not the same thing as sympathy. According to the American Heritage, the former is: "Identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings, and motives." A good description of the difference between the two, and I forget where I read this but it is not original, is that if I have sympathy, it is about me, whereas if I have empathy, it is about you. With sympathy, I feel bad for you, whereas with empathy, I understand that you feel bad and recognize the importance of your perspective. Sympathy is an emotion, whereas empathy is the intellectual understanding of emotion.

On May 28, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, a man President Obama has called one of his favorite conservatives, defended the role of emotion in the law:

In reality, decisions are made by imperfect minds in ambiguous circumstances. It is incoherent to say that a judge should base an opinion on reason and not emotion because emotions are an inherent part of decision-making. Emotions are the processes we use to assign value to different possibilities. Emotions move us toward things and ideas that produce pleasure and away from things and ideas that produce pain.  

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.

A judge's empathy gives her a better understanding of the facts at hand. I'm no lawyer, but I can think of six examples of judicial deliberations that require empathy: three about rendering opinions, three regarding legal technicalities, and all six below the jump.

There's more...

This will not be a long diary, but is Obama being arrogant about the impact of whomever he picks as a nominee for the Supreme Court?

If this article is true, I would say there is a level of arrogance to him that bothers me:

http://www.postchronicle.com/commentary/ article_212228373.shtml

If the past 100 days are any indication, W.'s nomination of Miers will end up looking like sheer genius when compared to Obama's choice to replace David Souter.

Consider the following sign which is now posted in the main window of the Oval Office:

Help Wanted!

Street savvy victim of racism and bigotry needed for lifetime, guaranteed government job in Washington, D.C.

Pro-choice atheist people of color with bilingual skills, clean IRS record, and ACORN experience encouraged to apply.

Background in Constitutional law not mandatory, but will be considered a plus. Must be willing to oppose powerful white male co-workers on a daily basis in collaboration with a tired old Jewish lady on her last legs.

Bring your genealogical history printout showing a pattern of slavery and or racial discrimination against you or your ancestors to the front door. Ask for BHO.

White males need not apply.

Confidential sources (Republican moles) within the administration say the White House has already received more than 1,000 applications and has started a "short list" which, so far, includes the following luminaries:

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California)

Angela Davis, former College professor

Sonia Sotomayor, a front runner because she is a woman and Hispanic, AKA, a "two-fur."

Asked to comment on Obama's racist and sexist screening criteria, a high-level administration source replied that the president has vowed to be very thoughtful and careful in selecting the female minority he ultimately nominates!

I am going to make a prediction right now- no matter who he picks, he will receive criticism from the Left, Right, and Center. Judging from the harsh criticism he is receiving before he has announced his nominee, I think it is safe to assume that he should pass on making any nomination at all at this time - after all, a man who lacks enough life experience to merit an honorary degree from Arizona State 'University' should not be presumptuous enough to think he's qualified to make a decision that could influence the future direction of the Highest Court in the Land!

There's more...

(cross posted at kickin it with cg)

Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies?  Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, examines why.  With the seemingly return of the culture wars and general hate being flung from across both sides of the aisle in recent days, this essay might be intriguing to some.

For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group--college students at Penn--consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).

This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because... um...eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because... um... the rags might clog the toilet." These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.

The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups--the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. ("Your dog is family, and you just don't eat family.") From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see--let alone respect--a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?

In today's New York Times, In No Laughing Matter Judith Warner adds:

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. "Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger," he told me in a phone interview.

Haidt also explores the meaning of morality and describes his experiences in a Hindu community in the early 90's, in which a he witnessed a hierarchical society with clearly defined gender and class roles. This gave him insight into why some in his own country might be attracted to similarly ordered social structures.

It really is a good read and I think helpful to framing the conversation in the upcoming weeks.

There's more...

I guess the main thing that terrifies me about Obama, something I have not brought up before, is that I suspect him to be a narcissist by the grandiose way he speaks..

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is fairly common, but its devastating to families. Unfortunately, people who had very stressful early childhoods are often narcissists. Its incurable and people who have it are emotionally crippled, although one wouldn't know it unless you knew them very well, because they often hide it very well.

But they often leave a trail of tears, broken promises, and broken lives in their wake. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong-Il, all NPD. Nero, Caligula, Bush I and especially, II, (it runs in families, but that is probably because of trauma, not heredity)

perhaps Reagan.

Sometimes its more obvious than at other times.

I think a LOT of GOPers are narcissists. A lot. The bad ones probably are, the ones who are obsessed by appearances, not substance. The good ones probably realize something is off with them too, like we do.

They are drawn to positions of power. Its sort of their only way of looking at the world. They can't love. Everything is measured by loyalty and what you can do for them. They often see compassion and empathy as weaknesses to be made fun of.

Are they human? Clearly, yes, but.. they are not the same as most of us. They hide it very, very well.

Clearly Bush is an narcissist, a classic one. Was Bill Clinton a narcissist? Many people would say so, because of Monica, but I don't think so because apart from that, he didn't have the classic delusional grandiosity that marks the disorder.

Here is a website on NPD and the problems they cause.

http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/howt o.html

There's more...

There's more...