A majority of Americans seem to have forgotten that the main point of the American justice system – the reason that trials take so long, the reason there’s so many rules and regulations and appeals, the reason we go on and on about Habeas Corpus and so forth – is based on the core idea that it is better to let 10 guilty men go free than to wrongly imprison 1 innocent man.
And this might seem absurd at first glance – you’re saying it’s better to let criminals go free?? But you need to look at it from the point of view of the innocent man – to put yourself in his shoes to understand how terrible it is to be unjustly imprisoned and have your freedom taken away… but that requires empathy.
Empathy is literally the understanding of how other people feel, to deeply understand their situation as if it were your own, and it is a core requirement for a just society to exist – or arguably any society, really. Because if you can’t understand how other people feel, if you have zero empathy1, you are effectively a society of one, because the only person you can really understand is yourself, and you will always be at odds with others because of that.
A just society requires empathy, it requires being able to understand one another, at least on some level. Without this, it’s just everyone going “me, me me,” and never accepting any other viewpoint but their own – everyone else is wrong, everyone else is out to get you for something, and only you matter.
And it doesn’t take much imagination to think of what kind of outcome such a “society” of empathy-lacking people would create, and how terrible it would be – for everyone.
- If you truly have zero empathy, you’re also probably a sociopath, which makes you absolutely not fit to exist in society, but that’s a whole other level we’re not getting into here. ↩︎
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