Amerika

The aretaic turn is a movement in contemporary moral philosophy and ethics to emphasize character and human excellence or virtue, as opposed to moral rules or consequences.

The Mob’s Encyclopedia-analogue

As usual, with Wikipedia, you get the people who have nothing better to do filling in the blanks, so you get the C+ papers repeated as “fact.” They get part of everything right and they’re so convenient, so we all rely on them at some point or another.

In this case, they partially understand something. Let’s look at another one of their kwalitee “definitions”:

Deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, “obligation, duty”; and -λογία, -logia) is an approach to ethics that focuses on the rightness or wrongness of intentions or motives behind action such as respect for rights, duties, or principles, as opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those actions.

The Mob’s Encyclopedia-analogue

What this and the “aretaic turn” have in common is this:

The idea that there’s a right way to do things that exists outside of rules and measurement of public opinion, or condemnation if a good idea goes wrong. For example, you often get punished for doing the right thing, because others prefer that we all do the wrong thing, so that way their wrongs don’t get noticed as much.

Keeping an abstract goal is always good; it makes even more sense if it includes a natural correspondence to reality, which is why their definition of de-ontological morality is flaky. The idea is to do what’s right and not what’s convenient, or socially defined as right. And that is the hidden truth between the lines of these wackypedia entries.