Those who hold wrong opinions are not therefore wicked or dim. Our attempts to persuade almost always fail, and the temptation to account for this failure in terms of the stupidity or immorality of others is with us always. A culture’s ability consistently to resist this temptation is perhaps the first virtue of public deliberation. The inability to resist it indicates a failure of sympathy and imagination, which is its own sort of stupidity and immorality. Indeed, the tendency to think the worst of those with whom we disagree is a failure of engagement in a different sense. It is a failure to empathise, to try to feel what it’s like from the inside of other minds, other histories, other lives.

—Will Wilkinson, Fiscal policy and disagreement: Too much engagement, or not enough?