Don't use the word "better", use specific criteria along which you want to measure people. I think that widespread conflation of betterness according to some criteria and some kind of absolute scale betterness (how do you even define it? Is it simply a social status by another name or something different?) is precisely the sort of thing that allows some people to strategically equivocate between the two concepts (or claim that other people are strategically equivocating).
This sort of thinking seems bad:
This sort of thinking seems socially frowned upon, but accurate:
Similar points could be made by replacing a/b with [group of people]. I think it's terrible to say something like:
But to me, it doesn't seem wrong to say something like:
Credit and accountability seem like good things to me, and so I want to live in a world where people/groups receive credit for good qualities, and are held accountable for bad qualities.
I'm not sure though. I could see that there are unintended consequences of such a world. For example, such "score keeping" could lead to contentiousness. And perhaps it's just something that we as a society (to generalize) can't handle, and thus shouldn't keep score.