President Obama surprised everyone in the audience by interrupting the regular afternoon White House press briefing May 1 in order to say that he had received Justice David H. Souter ’s official letter of resignation. Equally surprising has been the reaction to the qualities of a prospective justice outlined by Obama in his announcement.

Obama’s list of qualities was long. It contained the usual sort of character traits, more or less found in the Boy Scout’s Oath (minus all that stuff about sex and religion). In addition, however, it read a bit like the answers to the match-making questions used by eHarmony. Maybe that’s not such a bad idea. After all, he will have to live with his choice for a quite a while.

But Obama no doubt kept the Scout motto firmly in mind as he spoke: “Be prepared.” The critics were.

In less than 24 hours, virtually identical sound bites arose from every oppositional quarter. Obama, they claimed, was speaking in “code.” When he says he wants someone who is empathetic, what he really means is that he is going to choose a judicial activist who will make new law that favors whatever group he or she takes to be unfairly disfavored under the law.

When he says that he wants to pick someone who will add diversity of life experience, critics suggest that really means that he is bowing to the pressure of “identity politics” and that means nothing more than a demand for some representational quota.

Mainstream media coverage has done little better in sorting through what Obama said and likely meant than the obvious partisans. It’s one thing to watch Mary Matalin and Ann Coulter dispatched to rail against the evils of empathy (take a moment to take that image in). But it’s still another to have the cable anchors lead with the lowest common denominator question: is it a woman’s turn or an Hispanic’s turn this time?

No doubt, no White House, Democratic or Republican, would ignore entirely such considerations, if for no other reason than the fact that the media reverberations are so predictable. But it looks as if both critics and some media observers do need a little help decoding.

What’s the objection to empathy? And why should it appear on Obama’s list? One answer can be found in what is perhaps the best account of the subject of all times: Aristotle’s treatise “On Rhetoric.” Aristotle’s simple but illuminating claim is this: “What we care about does not escape our notice.”

The obvious corollary is that what we notice reveals what we care about. And so a good Supreme Court justice should be someone who is properly equipped to notice what is important for a justice to care about.

In fact, the Aristotelian insight is precisely the point Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was making when she spoke of the presence of but one woman on the Court. Her claim was not that women are a group who need their fair proportional share of representation on the court.

Ginsburg’s main point was that there are common differences between what women, as a matter of course, are likely to notice and what men are likely to notice, and that some of those differences matter to the quality of justice administered by the court.

Of course, Ginsburg did not claim that no man would notice what all women would notice. Neither half of that equation is accurate. Similarly, it would be a mistake to suppose that race of a justice is a fully reliable predictor of what he or she will be properly attuned to. Just compare Justice Clarence Thomas with Justice Earl Warren.

Indeed, one might think that the empathy displayed by the all-white Warren court in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case, is proof enough that what we notice is not well correlated with gender or racial and ethnic heritage.