Sex, Drugs, and Boredom

The distinction between character and personality is only a matter of definition and may not help the discussion in this case.

It is a little bit like saying someone is intelligent or not. There are dozens of different types of intelligences so reducing that range to a yes or no answer doesn't work.

Just as "people with personalities" (per the author) are better consumers than people with character, people with character have limiting and narrow belief systems just as much as people with personalities.

Big business criticism of Sotomayor is absurd and yet may have a point. Labor Unions are just as self serving and narrow minded as Big Business; they just language it and express it differently.

The problem with empathy can be illustrated by the following example.
I used to participate in a homeless feeding project every Sunday. We handed out lunch bags to the homeless from a table set up in a square. One week we decided to allow people with apparent disabilities to go to the front of the line. The next week the number of homeless with apparent disabilities (typically using crutches or canes) had doubled, the following week it had tripled.

People like Sotomayor want to help pass a lot of laws that puts people with perceived disadvantages in front of the line but that will create as many problems as it will solve.

There is a fine line between loving actions that help humanity evolve and loving actions that simply encourage us to make others take care of us. We haven't yet learned to walk that line.

I'm not sure I've made myself completely clear to you. My post really isn't about empathy as such, although I do believe that any emotionally healthy judge (whether liberal or conservative) will use their empathy in understanding cases that come before them. But I'm not saying "support judges who display empathy". I'm saying that the concern with empathy is really, at base, a concern about relativism.

Thanks for reading and commenting.