Here’s an observation that seems too simple to be interesting and, on closer inspection, is one of the most disquieting facts about human psychology.
Almost everyone believes they’re a good person.
This doesn’t mean everyone believes they’re perfect. People readily acknowledge specific flaws, regret specific mistakes, admit to being short-tempered or lazy or vain in particular ways. What they don’t generally do is hold the possibility that they are, overall and fundamentally, on the wrong side of whatever moral line they believe in. Perpetrators of genuine harm — violent criminals, corrupt officials, cruel bosses, controlling partners — overwhelmingly see themselves as good people who did what the situation required, or who were misunderstood, or who made specific errors that don’t define them. The very people whose actions have most visibly damaged others typically report moral self-regard in the normal range.
This has implications that are both clarifying and humbling. It means that being certain of your own goodness is almost no evidence that you actually are good. Everyone feels this certainty. The people who cause the most harm feel it. Some of the cruellest figures in history felt it. Moral self-regard, it turns out, is a very weak signal about whether someone is actually acting well.
Solzhenitsyn’s line
One of the most often-quoted observations about this comes from the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived eight years in Soviet labour camps before writing about the experience. In The Gulag Archipelago, he made a claim that has become his most-cited:
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
What Solzhenitsyn was arguing, from inside a system that had produced massive evil staffed by ordinary humans, was that the dividing line between good and evil doesn’t run between people — the good ones over here, the bad ones over there. It runs through each person. Everyone contains the capacity for both. What differs between people, Solzhenitsyn suggested, is not whether they have the capacity for harm but the specific circumstances that draw that capacity out.
This insight is consistent with the situationist research we looked at in the last article. It’s also consistent with a darker strand of research in the last several decades on how humans actually narrate their own moral behaviour.
Baumeister on the myth of pure evil
The most systematic research programme on this comes from the American social psychologist Roy Baumeister, whose 1996 book Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence examined how actual perpetrators of harm describe their own actions.
Baumeister’s finding, drawn from interviews, memoirs, court records, and research across many contexts, was striking and uncomfortable. Perpetrators almost never see themselves the way their victims see them. The violent husband doesn’t see himself as a wife-beater; he sees himself as a man who was provoked past his limit by an impossible woman. The corrupt executive doesn’t see himself as dishonest; he sees himself as someone who understands how business really works. The torturer doesn’t see himself as cruel; he sees himself as someone doing a difficult job for the larger good. The cult leader, the war criminal, the serial abuser — in almost every case, the perpetrator’s own account of their behaviour is substantially sympathetic to themselves.
Baumeister called the gap between perpetrator and victim perspectives the magnitude gap. Victims experience an event of a specific size — traumatic, life-defining, sometimes literally world-ending. Perpetrators experience the same event as smaller — a single moment, a specific reaction, something the victim overreacted to. The disparity isn’t usually conscious dishonesty. It’s the ordinary working of self-protective cognition. Nobody sees themselves as a villain in their own story.
Baumeister identified what he called the myth of pure evil — the cultural fantasy that bad things in the world are done by people who know they’re bad and do them anyway, who delight in cruelty, who have no reasons except malice. This myth, Baumeister argued, is almost always wrong. Real perpetrators almost always have reasons, and from their own perspective, the reasons make sense. They see themselves as responding to provocation, correcting injustice, defending their group, following legitimate orders, or doing what circumstances required. The purely evil person of fiction — sneering over their misdeeds — barely exists in real life.
This is important because the myth of pure evil shapes how we look for wrongdoing. We look for people who seem like villains. We miss the ordinary people, operating with ordinary moral self-regard, who are causing real harm while believing themselves justified. The worst people in your community are probably not the ones who feel guilty about their behaviour. The ones who feel guilty are the ones with enough moral sensitivity to notice when they’ve done wrong. The ones without that sensitivity, who are operating entirely within their own self-sympathetic frame, are harder to identify — partly because they’re harder to identify to themselves.
The moral-tribalism research
A related research tradition, developed by the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, has examined how moral judgements get shaped by group membership.
Haidt’s central finding, developed across many studies and summarised in his book The Righteous Mind, is that most moral reasoning is motivated by group loyalty rather than by dispassionate ethical analysis. People reach moral conclusions first, based on what their group believes, and construct reasoning second. When the reasoning breaks down under examination, they don’t typically update their conclusions; they construct different reasoning that reaches the same conclusions. The moral conclusions are, for most people, more stable than the reasoning supporting them.
This has implications for how moral certainty functions in practice. When you’re absolutely sure a particular position is right, and the people in the out-group opposing it are morally deficient, you’re often experiencing not careful moral reasoning but motivated group-based cognition. The feeling of certainty is particularly strong when it aligns with group identity. The people in your group probably feel the same certainty. The people in the opposing group feel equivalent certainty in the opposite direction. Both groups’ certainty is producing the same kind of self-regard, not a measure of who’s actually right.
This doesn’t mean moral positions are arbitrary or that everyone is equally wrong. It means that the feeling of certainty tells you nothing about whether you’re actually correct. People in every morally indefensible movement in history felt the same certainty. The feeling is a weak signal. What actually discriminates between moral positions is harder work — examining evidence, seriously considering opposing arguments, noticing when your reasoning aligns suspiciously well with what your group already believes.
The counter-thread worth hearing
Before endorsing universal moral self-suspicion as the only mature position, a genuinely important caveat.
Some research suggests that people are often better than they claim to be. The American psychologist Lara Aknin and colleagues have documented that ordinary people are significantly more prosocial than their self-reports or popular stereotypes suggest. People donate more, help more, and treat strangers more generously than the cynical account predicts. The actual distribution of human moral behaviour is skewed more toward ordinary decency than dramatic accounts imply.
And universal moral self-suspicion has its own costs. People paralysed by doubt about their own goodness can become indecisive, unwilling to act, or vulnerable to manipulation by people who exploit their scrupulosity. Some measure of justified self-regard is probably a healthy component of moral agency — the confidence that allows you to act well when action is required, rather than endlessly second-guessing whether you’re the right person to act.
The honest position is probably somewhere between universal suspicion and comfortable self-regard. The research does suggest that confident moral self-regard is poorly correlated with actual good behaviour. It also suggests that ordinary people are often genuinely decent in ordinary situations. The skill is holding both — recognising that your feeling of being a good person isn’t reliable evidence of actual goodness, while also not collapsing into debilitating doubt about whether you can act at all.
What this suggests practically
For an individual trying to live well, the research points to a specific discipline that’s worth developing.
Distrust your moral self-regard in exactly the situations where it feels strongest. When you’re absolutely sure you’re in the right, and the other people involved are clearly in the wrong, that’s often the moment your cognition is least reliable. The feeling of certainty is produced by the same mechanism regardless of whether you actually are right. Learn to pause at these moments and ask whether the certainty is coming from examination or from identity.
Take seriously the perspective of people you’ve hurt. Baumeister’s magnitude gap means that your account of a conflict and the other person’s account will typically differ substantially, and your account will typically be more sympathetic to you. This isn’t primarily lying. It’s the ordinary working of self-protection. Deliberately trying to hold the other person’s perspective — actually imagining the event from their side, not just dismissing their interpretation — is one of the harder things to do in moral life, and one of the more revealing.
Don’t mistake group agreement for moral correctness. When everyone around you agrees that some position is obviously right, check whether you’re doing moral reasoning or tribal affiliation. The two feel similar from the inside. One of them is worth much more than the other.
Assume you’re capable of the behaviours you condemn in others. The people who committed the worst acts in history were not a special category of humans genetically distinct from the rest of us. They were ordinary people who encountered specific situations and responded in specific ways. Under comparable conditions, your behaviour would probably be comparable. This isn’t despair; it’s accuracy. Planning your life around the assumption that you’re immune to the pressures that have produced harm in others is almost certainly wrong.
Be suspicious of particularly confident moral self-regard in others. People who present themselves as certain they’re morally correct, who show no doubt about their own behaviour, who frame disagreements as straight good-versus-evil — these are not usually the most reliable moral actors. The people who notice their own failings, take seriously the possibility of being wrong, and hold their own positions with some humility are, statistically, more likely to be actually behaving well.
The question that remains
The deepest thing this body of research teaches is what might be called the foundational cognitive move of moral maturity: the willingness to suspect yourself. Not to constantly doubt yourself to the point of paralysis, but to recognise that your feeling of moral rightness is produced by the same cognitive machinery that produces equivalent feelings in everyone, including the worst people, and that the feeling therefore provides limited evidence about actual goodness.
This is a counterintuitive thing to cultivate in yourself. It goes against the pull of ordinary cognition, which wants to experience you as the good guy in your own story. But the cultivation of this honest self-scepticism is probably the single most distinctive feature of mature moral agency. The people who grow morally across their lives are usually the ones who can hold the possibility that they might be substantially wrong about themselves. The ones who can’t hold it tend not to.
The question worth carrying, especially when you feel most certain that you’re in the right:
What would it take for you to notice, honestly, if you were actually the one behaving badly — and do you have any actual mechanism for noticing, or just the assumption that you’d feel it if it were happening?
Key research referenced: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973); Roy Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence (1996); Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012); Lara Aknin and colleagues’ research on prosocial behaviour; the broader social-psychology research on motivated cognition and moral reasoning.