ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on what might be called the ethics of moral judgement. Perhaps it is not surprising that people in Angang should expect the goodness or badness of a character to be made immediately obvious because that is exactly what is done in traditional Chinese opera. In opera, the use of facial paint and masks makes explicit before a word is sung or spoken—what type of character one is dealing with. People in rural communities are generally very aware of the contexts which cause people to fail, socially and morally, and it therefore is not difficult for them to be generous, at least part of the time. Against this background, deciding that the people around us are 'good ones' and 'bad ones' may be not only psychologically satisfying (since it resolves a tension surrounding the generic difficulty of attributing blame, once the context of people's actions is taken into account), but even socially necessary.
