Michael Jackson was proven INNOCENT in the court of Law. Please do not judge. Get to know the man. stop listening to the B.S. Media who brainwashes almost everybody including yourself. Michael has suffered enough in this world. Please don’t crucify him more. WHY has Michael sold more then $20,000,000 albums since his death? Because people finally got it that hey, THIS MAN HAD TALENT. Please leave him alone. ALL he wanted to do was Heal the World. In my opinion… MICHAEL IS A SAINT.

The insurance companies are waging a campaign of misinformation about the Canadian system. Don’t be duped by it.

Where do you get that idea? Ask a Canadian. Sure, it may cost less to the individual for some services, but the services are limited and you have to wait sometimes years for certain surgical procedures. Better? I think not.

Also ” Isn’t there anything that we can do to guarantee that American health care is not once again hijacked, controlled, and smothered by the insurance companies?”

I don’t think you have to worry about that. It is in the process of being hijacked, controlled, and smothered by the Big Brother Government.

Second, I’m not at all sure what you’re packing into the notion of “the same emotions as both sides of the case.” If my daughter breaks my son’s I-Phone because he refused to permit her to borrow it, I can empathize–experience her feeling of being short-changed–while simultaneously experiencing my son’s feeling that his I-Phone is his and he need not share it with his sister. I can simultaneously experience both their feelings, and therefore can empathize with both kids. It seems on your view empathy is a raw emotion that if you experience no other emotions contrary to it can be felt. I don’t think that’s a useful conception of empathy, some dictionary definition notwithstanding. Sympathy is a weaker attitude. Third, I can sympathize with someone without empathizing with that person. The bottom line, in my view, in judicial cases, is that judges should be able to experience the litigants emotional experiences and perspectives as a precursor to seeing/expereincing the world from that person’s shoes.

In terms of judges and judicial rulings, what gets praised or attacked as empathy often doesn’t fit the dictionary definition of empathy. For example in the case about the teenage girl (now an adult woman) who had been stripped searched at school, I very much doubt Ginsburg or any of the other justices, actually felt what that girl felt. I think rather she (perhaps) understood what the girl felt, and felt sympathy for the girl and her feelings, but understanding of, and sympathy for someone emotions isn’t the same as actually feeling/experiencing those emotions. True empathy isn’t very common, sympathy and/or understanding is much more likely.

Understanding of the emotions can be useful, and doesn’t seem likely to have much downside. Sympathy could be useful, but could be a source of bias. True empathy would be very likely to be a source of bias, and doesn’t seem like something that would be necessary or clearly useful in many judicial cases.

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As for my statements being a non-sequitur, well you seem to be making arguments that they are false. I disagree with that, but even if they are that wouldn’t make them non-sequiturs. You disagree with the truth of my premise, but a false premise doesn’t make for a non-sequitur. In different uses a non-sequitur can mean a conclusion that doesn’t logically follow from the premises in a formal argument, or it can refer to in which premise and conclusion are totally unrelated but which is used as if they were, or it can refer to a answer or reply that has no connection at all to the question or statement its replying to. Even if we assume that my statement is totally wrong, it wouldn’t fit any of those definitions of non-sequitur, it would just be a false statement used as a premise in an argument.

If OTOH by “empathy” you mean something like “understands how the people involved feel” (which I think is what a lot of people mean, even though its doesn’t fit with the dictionary definition I gave in my last comment), than such “empathy” can be a matter of understanding at least slightly or potentially relevant facts.

“the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner”

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/empathy

Note the experiencing part (and that its combined to the rest with an “and” not an “or”). If your experiencing the thoughts and/or feelings of one side in the case, your not just perceiving relevant facts. To the extent your truly experiencing empathy your are not being totally objective.