Humans are already biased towards thinking that various positive characteristics are correlated with each other. Keeping track of an explicit "goodness" variable would make that even worse. So while I don't see anything wrong with comparing specific characteristics between people or groups of people, I endorse the norm that it is not acceptable to make statements of the form "Person A is better than Person B" or "Group A is better than Group B". "Quality of character" is nowhere near specific enough.
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.