If more evidence were needed that we live in an era in which “feelings” trump quality of intellect and merit, the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, put the icing on that particular cake. Announcing that he would oppose the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court, Mr. Reid, a Democrat of Nevada, indicated that although he was impressed by Roberts’s qualities of intellect, he fretted about “hurtful” comments the then 26-year-old lawyer had made about women and minorities. That the senior Roberts wasn’t prepared to entirely disavow the junior Roberts was enough for Mr. Reid: thumbs down.

What is going on here? One wonders if the vast majority of great justices in the past would have passed the pop-psychology-sensitivity test that seems to be at work. During the Senate hearings on Roberts’ nomination, Senator Feinstein, a Democrat of California, pleaded to know more about the “man,” not the judge, but it is as a jurist that he is supposed to be assessed. Less than perfect people on some sensitivity scale can make, and have made, great jurists. At one point in our history, judgments were based on suitability for the office, not whether the person could tell a good sob story on Oprah or Dr. Phil.

At issue for Ms. Feinstein was a lawyer’s joke Roberts had written into a memo – a wisecrack about whether the world really needed more housewives to become lawyers. One could substitute any category of person. Tin ear securely in place, Ms. Feinstein intoned in the most serious way she could muster that this wisecrack demonstrated that Roberts was somehow insensitive to women’s aspirations. When Roberts explained that a joke is usually interpreted as, well, a joke, rather than to denounce himself at age 26 for a lower state of consciousness than he now possesses, he demonstrated that alleged “insensitivity” yet again.

Senator Schumer, the Democrat of New York, made the point more vehemently. “You may be the most powerful intellect ever to appear before this Committee,” intoned Mr. Schumer, but he was worried nonetheless, worried about John Roberts’s “heart.” The implication is that a “feeling” person of mediocre intellect would make a better candidate than someone who appears in the top percentile on every scale of intelligence and achievement. Consider, also, the opposite side of Mr. Schumer’s coin, for he was himself resurrecting a hoary gender stereotype, namely, that men may have the edge in intellect of an abstract, legal sort but are deficient in feelings. It follows as a matter of course that women may fall lower on the abstract, legal I.Q. scale but they are all about heart. Were some hapless senator to articulate this as the flip side of the coin, organized feminist groups would rightly be in an uproar.

Far more troubling than this presumably inadvertent resurrection of one of the oldest gender typologies around, was Mr. Schumer’s insistence, which Mr. Reid has joined, that unless one’s eyes moisten and one’s lips quiver on cue, one is emotionally deficient. At every opportunity, presumably, Supreme Court nominees, as well as candidates for political office or appointment, should tear open their shirts so that we – the people – can be reassured that there is a heart beating underneath. More: That beating heart should beat in time with some sense of collective bathos that transforms questions of injustice, fairness, loss, betrayal, hope, and fear into the banal stuff of psychodrama, fodder for tear-drenched afternoon television talk shows.

Persons of a certain reserve and decorum are deemed deficient as human beings even though the office for which they are running or to which they have been nominated is one they are supremely well qualified for. There seems to be little consideration of the notion that preserving a certain distance between observer and sufferer is a sign of respect for the human dignity of the sufferer. One doesn’t draw attention to how much one feels – look, ma, my heart is beating – but, instead, one’s focus remains where it belongs – with the condition of the sufferer and what, if anything the law has to say or can do about that.

There is so much that is dubious and even outrageous about such presumption. Posing heart v. intellect sows the seeds of mischief, suggesting that if one just feels enough, one has passed the test of suitability for higher office. But a judge is not a therapist. The infusion of psychobabble into the law does tremendous harm. It invites outcome-based manipulation of the law and justifies resorting to extra-legal sources and contortions in order that feelings trump – as if the heartfelt by definition supercedes thoughtful intellect bound by the tradition within which the judge finds himself or herself inserted.

But the law is designed explicitly to protect us against a deluge of “feeling,” be a firewall against an excess of emotion. Intellectual firepower and knowledge of the law – one thinks of Judge Roberts sitting there going through days of testimony without a single note, plus a modest sense of the law’s limits and purposes, are surely more reliable indicators of what sort of justice a nominee will be. I’ll take a powerful intellect and a modest sense of what law can accomplish any day.

Ms. Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago and is the author most recently of “Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World” (Basic Books, 2003).