When we talk about politics, the first object is to note whether we agree with our interlocutors or not. Only after noting whether agreement exists can we form a coalition, attempt to convince our opponent that he is wrong or throw up hands our in confusion and despair.

However, multitudes of problems prevent an assessment of agreement. For example, we might engage in ridiculous logical fallacies that get us nowhere: equivocation, false dilemmas, ad hominem attacks, irrational appeals to authority or we might even beg the question.

Fortunately, most of these fallacies are well covered in literature. However, in addition to engaging in logical fallacies, we might not believe that politics has the same scope or ends as our opponent. And finally, we might conceive of ourselves as being in the shoes – or eyes – of a political actor that is not our self, our interlocutor or the political actor our interlocutor imagines herself to be. I will call this the political actor preference problem, although it is probably the only example of such a problem.

Most of the time, when we are talking about politics, we are not talking strictly from our own perspective, but are actually throwing ourselves into other political actors' perspectives. We are often talking about ourselves qua president or prime minster, qua senator or MP. We imagine what a particular political actor would say about the political matter at hand, instead of focusing on what we should – or would – say.

For example, when we talk about abortion ("Abortion should be legal all the time always." "No, Roe vs. Wade was a terrible judicial decision. Where is the privacy issue? It's nonsense.") we are not usually talking about things that we personally should – or would, or will – do, like voting or picketing, but about what congress, the President, the courts or the ruler of the world should do.

Another example of this is when we talk about Social Security, we are not usually talking about whether we want to receive it or whether we will pay our taxes to fund it, but rather whether the government should have a policy of paying out social security benefits. The main feature of a speaker's actor preference is that they are not speaking from their own perspective, but from an imagined perspective.

I do not want to suggest that it is bad to speak as if we were the US President or the ruler of the world. It is only by using these tropes that we are able to empathise, tell stories and think politically. Being able to listen to each other, to understand each other, and to agree – or disagree – with each other is at the heart of knowing that other people have minds and thus at the heart of acting ethically toward our fellow human beings.

It is therefore of the utmost importance for us to try to understand how we can best understand each other. For only if we understand each other can we complete a conversation – agree or disagree – and ultimately act ethically towards one another. Communication is, after all, the key to political discourse.

Often, the fact that we choose different actors' perspectives means that we will literally talk past each other. This is because the actions available to certain actors might not be available or desirable to other actors.

At other times, the perspectives we adopt are not made explicit either because we do not recognise them ourselves or because we have intentionally hidden them in order to make our arguments more convincing. That is, we talk past each other because we are not ourselves and, sometimes, do not even know who we are when we are talking.

If I am the US President and you are the director of a radical environmental organisation, then we will never reach a consensus because, by anyone's standards, the actions and opinions of the president and the director of a radical environmental organisation are extremely different. In fact, they should probably never reach a consensus. If you are arguing as a radical environmental activist, the cost benefit analysis congress members must engage in appears reprehensible.

And so, if we are acting as these characters, there is no way that we – as regular arguing political people – can reach a consensus or even honestly disagree. These are people, after all, who never talk in real life, why should we imagine that they would talk in a speculative political conversation? The table of political conversation is large, but not large enough for everyone at the same time.

On the other hand, with a lot of work, the conversationalists might be able to bring people together that would never actually talk to one another. In this way, they might be able to mend the fissures in our political landscape.

Many political problems arise because we simply cannot imagine what it is like to be another political actor. However, people have a natural propensity to discuss politics through the eyes of another. If this natural propensity could be productively employed in the type of thought experiments typically used in political theory – examples of these include Hobbes' state of nature and Rawls' original position – it may benefit the cause of rational progress in politics.

If we use political actor preference differences in these traditional thought experiments, we may initiate a new type of thought experiment. This thought experiment cannot be thought alone; it must be thought together. We might perhaps want to call this thinking with politics.

Most of the time, when we talk about politics, we actually think against its grain. That is, we thinking of ways for politics to wither away so that our favourite positions might come forward as viable regimes – regimes of all types: economic, media, intellectual property, familial or social. But if there was a way to harness our ability – and our natural inclination – to think as others, this would be thinking with politics because politics, at least modern democratic politics, involves the recognition that different types of people are politically equal. Thinking as those people helps us politically come together as a society.

This is one of the points John Rawls hoped to uncover with his difference principle, one relevant section of which states that inequality is only justified if advantages are attached to "offices open to all under conditions of fair equality", and if it can be shown that these inequalities are necessary for improving the situation of the least advantaged member of society.

However, to think about improving the situation of the least advantaged, we need to empathise with that person. We need to be able to think politically of ourselves in the capacity of a least advantaged member of society. This should be recognisable as involving a thought experiment where we think as the least advantaged person.

So one thing we can do with our natural propensity to think as others is to push the envelope and think as the least advantaged member of our society. Often when talking about politics, we end up talking from the perspective of the ruler of the world. But the truly radical thing about our ability to think as others is that we can choose to think as if we were the person that has nothing. And we can choose to make our policy recommendations from this perspective as well.

But political actor preference allows us to do more than this. It enables us to get ahead of our voting behaviour. We can say things that would not be politically desirable or feasible. For instance, I am a democrat and pro-choice, but, in political arguments, I often advocate a position in opposition to the Roe V. Wade Supreme Court decision.

However, this does not mean that I would vote either to overturn Roe v. Wade – if this were possible – or would vote for an official that stated that they would vote against it. There are some political positions that are not possible because of the current political situation. Speech and political argument is one of the ways by which we can get around the political moment in order to understand where we actually stand, as opposed to where we politically stand, on the issues of the day.

The moral of political actor preference is fourfold. First, be aware which perspective is behind your words. Are you talking as the US President, the British Prime Minister, as an industrialist or as an environmental activist? For it is only after you recognise this that you might be able either to come back into the realm of your own eyes or possibly agree to talk about what somebody else – like the US President – should do in light of the relevant facts.

The second fold of the moral is that, when talking politics, you should attempt to figure out who your interlocutor could be. Third, you should call attention to the difference in actor preference between yourself and your interlocutor, and subsequently engage in a meta-discussion with your interlocutor concerning the possibility of agreeing on a common actor's perspective.

And fourth, you should attempt to guide your actor preferences towards those of the least advantaged – who, in some formulations, cannot speak for themselves. If everyone heeds these morals, then throwing ourselves into new perspectives might be seen as a great benefit to society, opposed to a human foible.