As a sociologist, Goode makes no judgment about whether a particular is "bad" or "evil", and considers deviance as a topic to be entirely dependent on whether the society at large considers the behavior deviant. In this view, a particular behavior can be deviant in one society, but normal in another. This is in contrast to the perspective of essentialism, which would say that a behavior either "really is" deviant or "really isn't", and that it is the task of the sociologist to discover and report on the truth of the matter, and what society at large believes is mostly irrelevant.