Virtue Ethics Explained
Focus on character, not rules or outcomes. Cultivate virtues like courage, honesty, and compassion. Ask what would a virtuous person do?
What was corrected
The article attributed Kohlberg's landmark longitudinal study to the journal Child Development (it was actually published as a monograph in Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development), listed the wrong co-authors for Angela Duckworth's 2007 Grit paper (Peterson, Quinn, and Seligman instead of the real Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly) along with unverifiable correlation figures, cited a 2005 'Augustine and Meindl' meta-analysis on moral identity that could not be verified, gave unverifiable figures for the Seligman/Peterson VIA survey's participant count and 'most common strength' finding, described Robert Jackall as a philosopher (he is a sociologist) and overstated Moral Mazes as having specifically predicted Enron, cited an unverifiable 2018 Military Psychology study for West Point's character program, and described Mahmood Mamdani's book Citizen and Subject, which is actually about colonial and postcolonial African state structures, as if it were a specific analysis of Mandela's negotiation tactics.
The section now correctly cites Kohlberg's study as a Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development publication, corrects the Grit paper's co-author list to Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly, replaces the unverifiable 2005 meta-analysis with the real, correctly cited Hertz and Krettenauer (2016) meta-analysis in Review of General Psychology, describes the VIA survey findings in terms that match the actual published research, correctly identifies Robert Jackall as a sociologist and describes Moral Mazes as describing this failure pattern in general terms rather than specifically predicting Enron, describes West Point's character program without the unverifiable study, and removes the Mamdani reference since it did not accurately describe the book's real subject.
Why this is better
Web searches for each citation and case-study detail found a mix of real sources with incorrect specifics (wrong journal, wrong co-authors, wrong discipline for the author) and claims that could not be verified or, in one case, a real book whose actual content does not match how it was used in the article. Since the underlying researchers, books, and organizations are genuine, the sections were rewritten to correct or remove the specific inaccuracies rather than deleting the material outright.
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