There is no one either good or bad, but circumstances make them so

We need to understand that situation, rather than character, usually matters more in how people behave, not so we can just let everyone off, but so that we can better understand why people do wrong and do more to prevent it. Most people are neither bad apples nor good eggs, but soft fruit that can easily turn from ripe to rotten.

Left and right have traditionally made opposite mistakes in this regard. Conservatives have placed far too little stress on the role of social circumstances in criminality, imagining that poverty and social exclusion are mere excuses for criminality, not causal factors in it. The left, on the other hand, has tended to overplay the social, imagining that people have no control over how they respond to circumstances, that all criminality is the inevitable result of iron laws of economic determinism.

What we are now understanding is that it is not either/or, but that there is perhaps more to be said for the traditional left-wing view than the majority believes. Politics is abut creating the conditions in which the chances of people staying in a morally good condition is higher. Personal moral responsibility is about avoiding situations that bring out the worst in us and developing the self-awareness to resist the temptation to do wrong when such situations are unavoidable.

The evidence suggests that most people blow with the ethical wind, but it does not show that it is not possible to hold fast, no matter what the moral climate. Most people are not of good or bad character, because strictly speaking, they have no robust character at all. The best response to that is to try to fortify our own, and not give in to the pessimism that says "there but for the grace of God go I", nor the naive optimism that only other people, never ourselves, are capable of doing terribly wrong things.