Good vs. Bad

What we most need to know about any man is surely this: whether he is good or bad. To be sure, we seldom put the question so crudely. Indeed we often affect a scorn for mere goodness, persuading ourselves that we are more concerned with a man's breeding, his intellectual vigor, his artistic skill or his practical efficiency, but in the end we admit, implicitly or explicitly, that we are more deeply interested in his honesty, his courage and his justice-- in a word, in his goodness-- than in his intellectual or creative endowment, his upbringing, or his possessions. All this amounts to saying that the most significant way of grouping human beings is as good or bad.

Mary Whiton Calkins, 

The Good Man and the Good: An Introduction to Ethics, 1918.