Eric Liu Author and former Clinton White House adviser , WA:
...A lack of empathy, a willful refusal to connect words with the reality of human experience, is its own form of bias...
Just as a general matter, it's a great thing that we're talking about empathy in civic life and political leadership. Empathy -- the ability to imagine what another is experiencing -- is what made Lincoln so transcendently great in a time of despair, what enabled FDR to convert his experience of disability into empowerment for others. It's what enables the most skillful intelligence agents to anticipate the moves and motivations of our enemies. It is what separates high-quality elementary school teachers from their peers. It is what allows great CEOs to win friends and influence people. Empathy is a hard asset, not a touchy-feely new-age indulgence. The more we recognize that, the stronger we are -- as individuals, as a country.
As for the Supreme Court nomination and judicial decisionmaking, I see why the right would fear that "empathy" is code for all kinds of things they fear. In the logic of conservative critics, empathy = bias = injustice. But here's the thing. A lack of empathy, a willful refusal to connect words with the reality of human experience, is its own form of bias and can work its own form of injustice. The job of a judge is to interpret. If a judge thinks she should be bound by the meanings of words in 1787, she is consciously choosing a specific form of interpretation. If a judge thinks she should be bound by the unchanging principles beneath the words of 1787, and should apply those principles to the ever-changing ways we live today, she too is choosing a specific form of interpretation. In both approaches, a judge is making a judgment call. But only in the second approach are we being straight about it. It's this second approach -- honoring foundational principles, while working within the broad phrasings of the Constitution -- that requires a capacity to imagine how other human beings experience the actual consequences of the law. Empathy. And it's this approach that I think is ultimately most faithful to original spirit of the Constitution and our very wise Framers.