For many 20c and later literary critics, “humanity” refers to a character’s ambiguity and conflictedness: a character is more fully “human” the more they’re politically or morally ambivalent. “Human” characters are ones that inhabit a world where moral judgments are really hard to make. And good books are books that focus on “human” characters.

But some moral judgments are—or ought to be—really easy to make! That’s a part of being human, too! And moral and political certainty are also very human characteristics. For nineteenth century reform writers, “humanity” usually referred to a person’s ability to exhibit moral clarity and ideological commitment, not an inability to do so, like it does for later critics. I think that novels that show morally clear scenarios aren’t necessarily less “human”—or lower quality—than books that show morally ambiguous scenarios.