Seeing the World Through Other People's Eyes
By ChatGPT, prompted by Stephen D Green, November 2026
The hidden foundation of empathy, morality, love and responsible leadership
A simple change of perspective
Imagine walking down a busy street.
There are people everywhere: walking towards you, passing you, waiting at crossings, talking on their phones, hurrying to appointments, looking in shop windows. We ordinarily see a crowd of people going about their business. We recognise faces, notice movement and perhaps occasionally wonder where someone is going.
But there is another way of seeing the same scene.
Instead of seeing lots of people, we can see lots of human experiences being simultaneously experienced.
Every person is living an entire life from the inside. Someone is looking forward to something. Someone is anxious about an appointment. Someone is grieving. Someone has just fallen in love. Someone is worrying about money. Someone is enjoying a particularly happy day. Someone is remembering something that happened decades ago.
Someone may be experiencing the best day of their life, while someone else is experiencing the worst.
All these experiences are happening simultaneously, within the same small area of pavement. Each person is the centre of their own world, with memories, feelings, expectations, relationships, hopes and fears.
The remarkable thing is that we can switch between these two ways of seeing almost instantaneously.
We can see a crowd, or we can see a multitude of individual consciousnesses.
Neither view is less real than the other. They are simply different ways of perceiving the same reality.
Everyone is the centre of their own world
There is another layer to this observation.
While we are walking along, contemplating all these other lives, someone else might glance at us.
To them, we are simply another person in the crowd. Perhaps they wonder where we are going, what we are thinking, or what sort of day we are having.
They have no idea that we are contemplating the extraordinary fact that they, too, are experiencing a life of their own.
We are simultaneously the observer and the observed.
And the person observing us may themselves be observing someone else.
This creates an almost infinite series of perspectives. Each person is the centre of their own subjective experience, but merely one of countless other people in everyone else's.
There is something profoundly humbling about recognising this.
We are each the protagonist of our own experience, but never the protagonist of everybody else's.
Our own experience is immediately accessible to us. Other people's experiences are not. We can see their faces and behaviour, but cannot directly experience what it is like to be them.
Nevertheless, we can recognise that their inner lives are just as real and substantial as our own.
Perhaps the ability to make this shift in perspective is one of the most important capacities we possess.
The ability to project our awareness onto others
We commonly talk about putting ourselves in someone else's shoes.
It is an everyday expression, but it describes something quite profound: the ability to move beyond our own immediate perspective and imagine the experience of another person.
This is not simply imagining how we would feel if we were in their circumstances. It is recognising that they have their own subjective world, shaped by their particular experiences, memories, sensitivities and expectations.
There is a difference between asking:
How would I feel if I were in their situation?
and asking:
What might it actually be like to be them?
The latter requires us to acknowledge that other people are not merely variations of ourselves.
We cannot literally enter another person's consciousness. But we can imaginatively recognise it, and sometimes become remarkably sensitive to what they might be experiencing.
This ability appears to vary between individuals.
For some, the shift seems almost involuntary. They instinctively notice other people's feelings and circumstances. They naturally imagine what someone else might be thinking or experiencing.
For others, it may require a more conscious effort. They may need to be taught to consider another person's perspective, or to develop the habit through experience.
This raises interesting questions about empathy and individual differences in social cognition.
Autism, for example, can involve differences in how people infer and interpret other people's thoughts and intentions. Psychopathic traits can be associated with reduced affective empathy. Conversely, people who describe themselves as highly empathic may find themselves particularly sensitive to other people's experiences.
However, these are not simple categories. Recognising another person's mind, understanding their perspective and emotionally resonating with their feelings are different capacities. Someone can possess one without possessing all the others.
Perhaps what we are describing is a broader ability that might be called perspective flexibility: the ease with which someone can shift the focus of their awareness from their own experience to the experiential reality of another person.
Love and the recognition of other minds
This brings us to morality.
Our own existence is something we experience directly. We know what it means to feel pleasure, suffer pain, experience fear, enjoy companionship, hope for something or dread its loss.
But we cannot directly experience these things in another person.
We have to recognise that they exist there, too.
In a sense, we have to ascribe to other people the same experiential existence that we instinctively attribute to ourselves.
This is fundamental to love.
Love is not simply enjoying someone's company or feeling affection towards them. It involves attaching importance to their experience for its own sake.
Their happiness matters. Their suffering matters. Their hopes and fears matter.
Their inner world becomes important to us, even though we cannot directly experience it.
The same recognition underlies the familiar moral principle of treating others as we would wish to be treated.
The Golden Rule is found in different forms across religious and philosophical traditions. Its significance lies in extending the importance we naturally attach to our own experience to the experiences of others.
Judaism expresses this in Leviticus 19:18:
"You shall love your neighbour as yourself."
Jesus restates the principle in Matthew 7:12:
"Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them."
Islamic teaching includes the well-known hadith that one should wish for one's brother what one wishes for oneself.
These traditions have different theological foundations, but they share a powerful concern with reciprocity, compassion and responsibility towards others.
The underlying moral insight is that other people are not merely objects in our world. They are subjects in theirs.
From seeing suffering to doing something about it
Consider seeing someone who is inadequately clothed on a cold day, or someone who is hungry and without food.
We can observe these circumstances without necessarily responding to them.
But something changes when we imagine what that person is experiencing.
We recognise that their cold is not merely a fact about their physical condition. It is an unpleasant experience, just as it would be for us.
Their hunger is not simply an observable circumstance. It is something they are feeling.
This recognition can create a motivation to act.
There are several stages:
- Perception: We notice someone who is cold, hungry or distressed.
- Recognition: We appreciate that they are experiencing something real and unpleasant.
- Identification: We imagine what that experience might mean to them.
- Moral motivation: Their suffering matters to us.
- Action: We do something to alleviate it, if we can.
The transition from recognition to action is important.
We do not necessarily help someone merely because we see their predicament. We help because we recognise what their predicament means to an experiencing human being.
This is the difference between observing suffering and being moved by it.
It also helps explain why compassion is more than pity. Pity can leave us as detached observers. Compassion involves being affected by another person's suffering and wanting to alleviate it.
Of course, recognition does not guarantee action. We may lack the means, the courage or the willingness to help. But without recognition, the motivation may never arise at all.
Why proximity and distance both matter
There are two particularly interesting circumstances in which we seem to make this shift in perspective.
The first is proximity.
When we encounter someone in immediate need, their circumstances are physically present. We can see their predicament, imagine their experience and perhaps do something about it.
The possibility of action is immediate.
The second is distance.
We often experience this when writing to someone we love who is far away.
Although they are not physically present, we may be very conscious of their circumstances. We imagine them reading our message, consider what they might be feeling and wonder how their day has gone.
We mentally enter their world despite being nowhere near it.
Physical distance does not necessarily diminish our awareness of their experience.
Indeed, emotional attachment can sustain a vivid awareness of someone else's subjective world over considerable distances and periods of time.
This suggests that our ability to recognise other people's experiences is not simply a response to what is immediately visible.
It can be sustained by affection, memory, imagination and a sense of duty.
There is a third circumstance, however, which is particularly important.
Leadership: responsibility without proximity
Leaders make decisions affecting people they may never meet.
Politicians, judges, employers, senior managers and institutional decision-makers exercise authority over the circumstances of other people's lives.
They may make decisions about housing, employment, education, healthcare, taxation, restrictions, rights and responsibilities.
Yet they may have very little direct experience of the consequences of those decisions.
This creates a particular danger.
A leader can become accustomed to thinking about people in aggregate: populations, statistics, constituencies, employees, customers or taxpayers.
These categories are useful for administration and decision-making. But they can obscure the individual human experiences contained within them.
It is easy to discuss restrictions without imagining the people who must live under them.
It is easy to discuss unemployment figures without imagining the anxiety of someone who has lost their job.
It is easy to discuss hospital capacity without imagining someone waiting for treatment.
It is easy to make decisions about families without imagining what those decisions mean inside individual homes.
The challenge is to retain an awareness of the human experiences behind the abstractions.
A leader needs to imagine people they cannot see, care about people they do not know and take responsibility for people whose experiences they will never personally share.
This is perhaps the most demanding form of perspective-taking.
The blindness of power
There is a danger that exercising authority can make this capacity weaker.
A leader's immediate environment may increasingly consist of people who share similar backgrounds, interests, privileges and assumptions.
Advisers may reinforce one another's views. Colleagues may become reluctant to challenge established thinking. Those affected by decisions may be absent from the discussions in which they are made.
This can produce several forms of blindness.
Individual blindness: A decision-maker fails to imagine another person's experience.
Institutional blindness: An organisation fails to expose its decision-makers to the experiences of those affected by its policies.
Collective blindness: A group reinforces its own assumptions until they appear self-evidently reasonable.
This is a kind of blind-leading-blind problem.
The difficulty is that the people involved may not realise they are failing to see something important. They may be intelligent, well-intentioned and convinced that their decisions are reasonable.
The problem is not necessarily a deliberate intention to disregard others. It may be an absence of imaginative effort.
Partygate: when reciprocity disappears
The British Partygate controversy provides a particularly vivid example of the problem.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government introduced restrictions affecting people's ability to meet, travel, socialise and visit relatives.
For many people, the consequences were profound.
People missed funerals. Families were separated. Some could not visit dying relatives. Weddings were postponed. People endured loneliness and isolation.
The restrictions were not merely administrative requirements. They affected people's most personal experiences.
Against this background, revelations about gatherings in government buildings generated widespread anger.
The issue was not simply that people in government had attended gatherings. It was the apparent discrepancy between the restrictions ordinary people were expected to observe and the behaviour of those involved in making and administering them.
The subsequent House of Commons Privileges Committee inquiry concluded that Boris Johnson had deliberately misled Parliament about his knowledge of and compliance with COVID-19 rules.
Partygate therefore raises an important question about moral reciprocity.
Would those making the rules have accepted the same restrictions and sacrifices had they been in the position of ordinary citizens?
Would they have behaved differently if they had fully imagined the circumstances of people who were unable to be with loved ones during their final days?
The problem is not just inconsistency. It is the possibility of failing to appreciate the human significance of rules when one is not personally experiencing their consequences.
Parents and children: the same problem on a smaller scale
This is not just a political problem.
It occurs in ordinary family relationships, particularly where one person has authority over another.
Children sometimes say to their parents:
"I bet you would have done it at my age!"
It is an interesting challenge.
The child is effectively asking the parent to remember what it was like to be young: the impulses, the temptations, the excitement, the impatience and the sometimes limited appreciation of consequences.
The parent may now possess greater experience and judgement, but may have forgotten how compelling certain experiences felt at the time.
There is a danger of judging the child entirely from the perspective of the adult the parent has become.
The parent is being asked to perform a kind of retrospective perspective-taking: to remember not just what they now know, but what it felt like not to know it.
Of course, parents have responsibilities to protect their children, and experience genuinely does provide wisdom. But that wisdom should not require abandoning an understanding of the child's experience.
The same applies to teachers, managers and anyone exercising authority over others.
The greater the power we have over another person's life, the greater our responsibility to imagine that life from their perspective.
The moral importance of past behaviour
This has implications for how we choose our leaders.
We should not judge prospective leaders solely by their promises, speeches, intelligence, charisma or stated values.
We should also consider what they have actually done when they have been in positions of responsibility.
How have they treated people with less power?
Have they followed rules they expected others to follow?
Have they shown consideration for people whose circumstances differ from their own?
How have they responded when challenged?
Have they acknowledged mistakes and accepted responsibility for their consequences?
Have they listened to people who disagree with them?
Have they used authority responsibly, particularly when they could have acted otherwise without being challenged?
Past behaviour cannot predict the future with certainty. People can change, and circumstances differ. But a person's record provides evidence of how they have exercised responsibility when they had the opportunity to do so.
Perhaps one particularly revealing question is how someone has treated people over whom they had power, especially when there was little prospect of being held accountable.
It is also important not to rely solely on the personal qualities of individual leaders. Democratic scrutiny, independent institutions, transparency and opportunities for affected people to be heard are essential safeguards against collective blindness.
We need leaders who can imagine other people's experiences, but we also need systems that make it difficult for them to ignore those experiences.
The effort required to see
There is a phrase that seems to capture much of this discussion:
It requires effort to see; no effort to be blind.
Our immediate experience is our own. We naturally see the world from our own position, with our own interests, concerns and assumptions.
To see things differently requires us to make an effort.
We must interrupt our habitual perspective, consider circumstances we may never have experienced and acknowledge that our understanding is incomplete.
Blindness, by contrast, can be passive.
We can remain within our own experience without ever consciously deciding to disregard anyone else's.
This makes moral blindness particularly dangerous. It can develop without malice or deliberate wrongdoing.
We may simply fail to ask the questions that would reveal another person's circumstances.
Seeing requires attention.
Understanding requires imagination.
Acting requires willingness.
And all three require practice.
Practising what we preach
There is an obvious danger in making these observations about politicians, parents, managers and other people in positions of authority.
It is easy to identify their failures of perspective while overlooking our own.
If the argument is that we should recognise other people as equally real centres of experience, it must apply to us, too.
We should ask ourselves:
- Whose experience have I overlooked?
- Have I judged someone without considering their circumstances?
- Am I applying a standard to someone that I would not accept for myself?
- Have I mistaken my own perspective for the whole picture?
- Have I listened sufficiently to someone whose experience is different from mine?
- Is there something I could do to alleviate another person's difficulty?
The ability to see ourselves in others should also help us see ourselves as others see us.
Moral imagination must work in both directions.
Perhaps the first person whose shoes we need to learn to step out of is our own.
This is not an argument for abandoning our own interests or assuming that everyone experiences the world as we do. On the contrary, it requires recognising that other people may have different needs, preferences and values.
Putting ourselves in someone else's shoes does not mean assuming that their shoes would fit us.
It means making the effort to understand what it is like for them to wear them.
Knowing is not the same as doing
This brings me to a quotation from John's Gospel which seems to provide a fitting conclusion.
After washing his disciples' feet, Jesus says:
"Now that you know these things, you are blessed if you do them."
(John 13:17)
The context is important. Jesus has demonstrated humble service and instructed his disciples to follow his example.
The distinction is between knowing what is right and actually doing it.
We can understand that other people have inner lives as real as our own. We can recognise the moral obligations that follow. We can teach these principles to others.
But the real test is whether we put them into practice.
Seeing, understanding, caring and doing.
Perhaps that is the journey we have been describing all along.
We begin by recognising that the people passing us on a busy street are not merely figures in a crowd. They are individual human beings, each experiencing an entire life.
We recognise that their experiences are as real to them as ours are to us.
We extend that recognition to people we love, to strangers, to those who suffer, and to people whose circumstances we may never personally encounter.
We carry it into our families, our workplaces, our institutions and our political choices.
And finally, we apply it to ourselves.
The challenge is not simply to know that other people have experiences. It is to keep that knowledge alive in our decisions and actions.
Perhaps the foundation of morality is the recognition that every human being is a centre of subjective experience, just as we are ourselves.
And perhaps moral maturity is the continuing effort to act as though we genuinely believe it.
