Rule 3 says 'Remember most people are good, competent, and worthy of respect'. But what does this actually mean?

I'll start by describing the one person in my life that I met that I'm confident was a bad person. He was a 16 year-old boy who went out one night with some friends looking for trouble. They found two homeless people sleeping in a cemetery and and stoned them to death, then jumped on their bodies until their chest cavities caved in and their broken ribs pierced the skin. He found out that one of the men had a son who went to the same school as him, so he taunted the boy by telling him that he had killed his father. This is how he got caught. He was interviewed by my forensic psychology professor while I recorded the interview from behind one way glass. The boy was calm and collected, and cracked jokes as he spoke to my professor. He had shaved his head for the court case. My professor eventually crawled out of the room saying he felt like he had been locked up with a lizard. In court, the boy lied so effectively that he managed to put most of the blame on his friends. He went to jail anyway, and his family hired a gangster to look after him, and he got out after a few years. I don't know what happened to him after that.

That's the one time I met somebody that I think was genuinely bad.

I have met other people who made me wonder if they were psychopaths - technically people who don't feel remorse - but while these people didn't seem troubled by harm they had inflicted on others, they didn't seem to actively enjoy hurting other people. I knew one man who may technically have qualified as a psychopath, but had been raised by strict parents, and had a strong moral code, albeit one not reinforced by empathy or remorse.

So if even some psychopaths aren't unequivocally bad, and only about 1% of the population is a psychopath anyway, that leaves an awful lot of good people, right?

But that argument doesn't seem to chime with the fact that a lot of bad stuff seems to get done in the world. Was Donald Trump right when he said there were a lot of fine people on both sides of a white-supremacist rally and counter demonstration? Can you attend a white supremacist march and be a good person? By what criteria could we decide that someone is 'good'?

The traditional way of considering someone to be 'good' was that they adhered to a moral code. But there are two obvious problems with this argument. The first is that moral codes are relative. 'Good' ancient Romans did things that would horrify modern Westerners, and the same 'good' modern Westerners perform acts of individualism that many people from traditional collaborative cultures would consider to be unwise or morally wrong.

The second problem with using adherence to a moral code as a judgement of who is 'good' is the modern understanding that human beings are more behaviorally pliable and influenced by circumstance than we would like to believe. It is uncomfortably possible to pressurise people to do things that conflict with their moral codes. There are some famous examples of this, but if you consider how familiar most/all of us are with most/all of the seven deadly sins (gluttony, laziness, pride, lust, greed, envy and anger), it's a reminder that when used as a test for goodness, adherence to a moral code may throw up a lot of false negatives.

Another test for 'goodness' may be whether the person considers themselves to be a good person. Good people can define themselves as good according to their relationships. Are there people that they actively love and care for, and do they try to minimise harm and indifference to those outside their circle of concern?

I once read about someone who said that whenever they start to doubt the goodness of the world, they go to an airport and watch the sadness of people who are being parted, and the joy of people being reunited. Surely having the capacity for love is the mark of a good person? Surely wanting the best for someone else, and being prepared to actively invest in securing that outcome is a test for goodness?

Another test of goodness is utility theory - the idea that goodness is the act of maximising well-being and minimising suffering.

So the three tests are (1) adherence to a moral code, (2) consideration of self as a good person because of love and care for others, and (3) utilitarianism.

But the question remains; is it possible to be a good person if you do bad things? At the trivial end of the scale it is easy to answer yes. Most of us consider our virtues to sufficiently outweigh our vices. But what about more significant wrongdoing?

In South Africa in the 1980's, people who were considered to have betrayed the anti-apartheid movement could get 'necklaced' - have an old tire forced over their heads which was set alight, and they would burn to death inside the molten rubber while a plume of black smoke announced the execution. I remember seeing footage on the evening news of a man being burned to death while a young woman stomped on his genitals as he lay on the ground. I can still picture how she twisted her body as she stamped so as to strike him accurately with her heel in his testicles as he died.

Could she have been a good person? Did she strive to adhere to a moral code? Were there people that she loved and cared for? Did she believe in the maximum good?

What about white supremacists marching in Charlottesville? Could there have been good people in there?

To answer this we need a theory of badness. Some people are bad - psychopaths. Whereas many of us have harmful impulses, in normal people these are moderated or contained by restraining emotions such as empathy, guilt and shame. Some people lack these emotions and are genuinely bad people who are a scourge on society. This is sadism - the pleasure of inflicting pain. But these people are rare, leaving us with the task of explaining a lot of bad human behaviour performed by people who may not be bad.

There are four generally accepted social circumstances under which love and utility can be suspended and harm caused to others in a non-sadistic and moral way - i.e. harmful things done by good people. These exemptions are used to justify a range of harm from mild inequality at the one extreme to war at the other. They are competitiveness, tribalism, vengeance and inertia.

The first exemption is competitiveness. I know that my friend would have been happier had I not beaten him on the squash court this morning, but I do not consider the beating to have been immoral. There is a joke about a pair of hikers who realise they are being stalked by a lion. One hiker takes the time to swap his heavy hiking boots for running shoes. When the other hiker says he still won't be able to outrun the lion, he says, "I just have to outrun you." The joke is funny because it is a form of morally acceptable competitiveness. Competitiveness operates when we assume there to be limited utility and that we are justified in securing or earning a disproportionate but necessary share.

There was only so much happiness to be had on the squash court this morning, and I consider that through my play I earned the full share of it. This may seem asinine logic - an error of perspective - but if you live in a privileged society you almost certainly use it to justify your privilege. We believe that there is only so much wellbeing to be had, and we have earned through fair competition our greater proportion of it against those less fortunate, such as war refugees, and disease, famine and poverty stricken people. This sense of fair competition is partly we justify denying these poor people admission to our societies through border control, and unequal distribution of wealth more generally.

The second exemption is tribalism. Tribalism is the idea that we are more beholden to those close or related to us, and less beholden to those different or distant from us. An extreme form of tribalism is used to justify the meat industry - that it is morally acceptable to keep sentient beings in conditions of unhappiness and kill them at our convenience because they are a different species from us. But tribalism is also used to justify global inequality - we are not beholden to some poor people because they live in different countries from us. This logic allows people to accept global levels of hardship and inequality that some would find unacceptable nationally.

Tribalism was used by white South Africans to justify apartheid - black people were considered to be culturally, biologically and historically different from white people, and so unequal treatment was justified. There are two problems with this. The first is that tribalism may not be a justifiable moral exemption for human inequality under any circumstances. The second is that the definition of tribe in apartheid South Africa was arbitrary and ridiculous. But before you condemn 1980's apartheid-supporting white South Africans too quickly, if you are one of the winners in the game of global inequality, consider how your privileged existence is maintained by the fact that you are considered less beholden to those people outside your national borders - a distinction between you and them which is as man-made and may be as arbitrary as that which once separated black and white South Africans.

The third exemption under which love and utility can be suspended is vengeance or punishment. Vengeance is justified on the grounds of deterrence (that it increases utility through the administration of harm by preventing larger future harm) and retribution - that 'settling the scores' through administering harm is moral. In its ideal form vengeance may well be morally justifiable (certainly more justifiable than tribalism), but its limitation is in its application. Legally, in order for someone to be culpable of wrongdoing, they need to have malign intent, desire, and action. But as human beings we are biased towards seeing intent in place of randomness. This predisposes us to judging that actions are culpable when they are not.

The Fundamental Attribution Error is the common human mistake of attributing the error and harmful actions of another as intentional, and the errors and harmful actions of ourselves as misfortune. When we take vengeance which in our minds is justified, but in the receiver's mind is not, they take this as an injury which in itself needs to be punished, setting up a cycle of violence or harm in which each party considers itself to be the moral actor. A milder form of vengeance is when we tolerate the misfortune of others with the justification that through their own actions or negligence they must deserve it in some way.

The fourth exemption is inertia - the idea that the status quo has a moral weight that you are not obliged to change. Walking past a poor person with £1000 in your pocket when they have nothing is not considered to be the same as starting with £990 and taking their only £10, even though the outcome is the same. This exemption relies on the idea that we are responsible for actions, rather than outcomes - that if we did not act to create another's suffering, we are not responsible or complicit. We can 'wash our hands' of the situation. It is a widely used exemption that is considered binding. But it has least three flaws. The first is that we do not apply the inertia exemption to those close to us - if a family member or close friend is suffering we feel responsible to affect the outcome whether or not it was our actions that caused the situation. So in this sense, the inertia rule is actually a subset of tribalism. Second, while you may not feel that your actions caused the situations, in some cases they did. Many liberally minded white South Africans in the 1980's did not feel that they were responsible for apartheid, but in partaking of its privileges may have been more actively involved than they realised. The same could be said for liberal westerners now, whether it is for the misfortune suffered by people from poor countries, or minorities within their own countries, who are differentially targeted by police and recruited for jobs.

If you were able to look at pictures of Alan Kurdi, the drowned 3 year-old Syrian boy found face down on a Turkish beach who became the symbol of the refugee crisis in 2015, do nothing, and still consider yourself a good person, you would have been using a combination of the above four exemptions.

The same exemptions with different emphasis and degree are used by those white supremacists and South African anti-apartheid necklacers who consider themselves good people.

It may be that many acts of harm are not caused by moral absence or lapse, but through degrees of error in the application of the exemptions - perspective failings in competitiveness, group-identity failures in tribalism, and errors of intent in vengeance.

When testing for bad people, false positives and false negatives both matter. False negatives (believing bad people to be good) can expose us to harm through a failure to use avoidance or deterrence strategies. But false positives also matter because when we treat good people as bad it inclines them to do bad things. This is why rigorous use of the three tests and the three exemptions is useful.

Remembering Rule 3, that most people are good, competent and worthy of respect can help us overcome our vulnerability to the Fundamental Attribution Error and look for a more complex, interesting and accurate interpretation of difference than that our opponent is bad or stupid. Because when we make that mistake we validate their use of the tribalism and vengeance exemptions and we decrease the utility of both of our worlds.

We need to remember before casting judgement that when it comes to goodness, beauty may be in the eye of the beholder. When we are reminded of our shared humanity and shared moral code, people become more good when we perceive them to be.