“The point is to inhabit the position, not the person,” Serpell writes. Instead of feeling someone’s pain, you try to grasp the larger mechanisms that cause someone to suffer.

Rawls and Arendt were preoccupied not with feeling but with fairness — an attempt to imagine the world one would want if one were born into a different situation.

For Arendt, forming an opinion was an active process of “making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent.”