Read through an interview with Chris Evans where he talks about how difficult Captain America is as a character because he’s simply *good.* The implication is - as we’ve all been taught - that unalloyed goodness is *boring.*

Without darkness, without vice, without a tragic, scarring backstory, or sophisticated, ironic humor or cynicism, a character is unaffecting - uninteresting - dull. Why are we taught this? It doesn’t strike me as true.

As C.S. Lewis observes in his preface to Paradise Lost, it is easier to *write* a character who is riddled with evil, unprincipled, morally broken - because that’s what most of us are like. But is it really harder to watch or read a truly morally good character? Is it boring?

That kind of goodness in real people is so deeply attractive - it’s radiant and captivating and warming. Really deeply good people so often draw others to themselves without even being aware that they are doing so, and we become better just by being near them.

Really morally good characters in fiction of all kinds are rare (I think because they are harder to write, because it is harder to write what you don’t know), but people love them when they find them. (People also hate them.)

Children, who have not yet learned otherwise, are especially transfixed by goodness in stories.

To teach that deeply morally good characters are boring, as I often was as a student, is a failure of the modern moral imagination, a tip of the cap that we’ve given up on all that.

It is worth reflecting on, though: who are the really well-written morally good characters in our stories? Are they interesting? Are we drawn to them? Might we be made better by merely encountering them?

And, if so, might we also be made worse by submerging ourselves in fictional worlds void of deeply good men and women?