My son is nine. He loves detective stories, especially Sherlock Holmes, and after finishing one he often comes to me excited to retell the best parts. But when he does, he tends to refer to every criminal simply as “the bad guy,” as if all offenders were the same person. Their names blur together, and so do the differences in motive, character, and circumstance.
That habit of dividing the world into “good people” and “bad people” easily grows beyond detective fiction, where moral positions are usually clear. It starts to shape how a child reads neutral stories, inspirational tales, and even stories meant to teach values. Eventually, it can stretch all the way to politics and relations between countries. My son has asked me more than once whether the United States is a bad country. He asks because he hears headlines read aloud at home, and children absorb more than adults think. That is not a question that can be answered honestly in a single sentence. To explain it, I have to slow down and talk about conflicts of interest, international realities, and the weight of history.
A few days ago, I was on the phone with my younger brother. He told me he had concluded that someone was a bad person, and then he gave me his standard for judging people. In his view, a good person says: what is yours is yours, and what is mine can also be yours. A person who is neither especially good nor bad says: what is mine is mine, what is yours is yours, and neither of us takes advantage of the other. A bad person says: what is mine is mine, and what is yours is mine too.
I broadly agree with this plain and intuitive standard. Yet because it is so plain, it also leaves too much unsaid, and that is where the real difficulty begins.
The line between good and bad is rarely clean. In many cases it changes with one’s position, and what looks good from the standpoint of one individual may look bad from the standpoint of society as a whole.
Take a simple example. Imagine a chivalrous outlaw who robs the rich to help the poor. He kills a wealthy man’s prized horse, gets two jin of meat from it, eats one jin himself, and gives the other jin to a beggar on the roadside who is close to starving. To the beggar, he is a savior. To the wealthy owner, he is a villain of the worst kind. But from the perspective of society as a whole, he is also clearly harmful. He and the beggar together gain only two jin of meat, while society loses a fine horse. And yet for a very long time, the mainstream historical imagination would have praised him as a hero. The reason is simple: most people were looking at the situation from the beggar’s side. In other words, the majority saw themselves as much closer to the beggar than to the rich man.
If we want the most accurate standard for deciding whether someone is good or bad, we should judge by that person’s overall effect on society, treating everyone together as a whole. But to remain consistently at that level of judgment, one would first have to become something like a sage. Almost no one is free of self-interest. Most people, naturally enough, see things from their own position. Once that happens, the boundary between good and bad stops being fixed.
What is true for individuals is also true for nations. Change the angle, and the shape of the mountain changes with it. The verdict depends heavily on where one stands.
So the question of good and bad is not really a matter of final conclusions. It is first a matter of standpoint. If you want to explain the conclusion, you have to explain the standpoint that produced it. That is why the issue is so hard to make clear, especially to a child.
When I speak to my son, I try to do so patiently. I hope he can learn to look at society from the broadest possible perspective, to judge good and bad not by personal gain or loss, but by overall benefit and harm to the whole. Yet I also know that under the social systems we actually live in, the type best adapted to survival may be the calculating economic actor. Truly good people may have a hard life, and sages are nowhere to be found.
That leaves education in an uneasy place. I want my son to grow up open-hearted, tolerant, and as capable as possible of accommodating the world. But I also want him, in his own life, to understand reality clearly enough to make calm decisions about what to give up and what to hold onto. There is already a built-in tension between those two aims. We are raised on ideals and then sent out to live in reality. Perhaps that is one reason so many adults remain troubled.
Even the most self-interested person rarely tells a child to grow up selfish. At least, I have never seen it. Some parents are indeed narrow and self-serving, and they do pass those traits on to their children. But in the act of educating them, they still believe they are pursuing something unselfish. If the outcome becomes selfish, they often cannot recognize how far the result has drifted from their original intention. That is not mainly a problem of motive. It is a problem of limited understanding.
Every parent wants to raise a good child, perhaps even an exceptional one. Yet society still ends up full of bad people. Why? Perhaps because the “good person” many people imagine is not the same as a good person judged from the perspective of society as a whole.
Learning how to judge goodness and badness may be the first task in a child’s moral education. It may also be the first task in the cultivation of oneself.