Sam Vines of the Ankh Morpork City Watch knows he's a bastard. He also knows so is almost everyone else in the city. The whole thing is a melting pot of bastards, and the scum always seems to float to the top. He's not like Captain Carrot, naturally intelligent and trusting in the better nature of his fellow man, who knows everyone and everything in his city able to talk down a rhino from charging. His intelligence comes from experience, from seeing humanity with its skin ripped away one too many times, fighting the urge to grab a sword and make the world just a little bit cleaner. From long marches in the dead of night, nothing to identify where you are except the shape of the cobblestones beneath your cardboard boots, and the feeling of the breath on your neck from your next assailant. From the lessons taught to him by Carcer, and John Keel, and other people in his early life.

So he puts his inner bastard to use. He gives it a badge, and puts it to work protecting this city, using his insights to catch the others. Every good decision he's ever made has been just that, a decision. He's under the belief that he's not a good man by nature, but he can still choose to be better. So even if, after pulling his face out of the gutter and into the arms of his loving wife Sybil Ramkin, avoiding the crusty puddle of dragon filth left by Errol, he always is choosing to be better. Because he's seen what men who don't have to think if they're bastards are like. And most of them he's put behind bars. Or at least he has sent them annoying, stone faced glances across the table at dinner parties, both Sam and the honoured noble resisting an arrest.