Righteousness
quality of being morally correct and justifiable
Righteousness is the quality or state of being morally right or justifiable. The concept is rooted in religious or divine law and broadly encompasses moral correctness, justice, and virtuous living as dictated by a higher authority or set of spiritual beliefs. It is found in many religions and traditions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism. It is an attribute that implies that a person's actions are justified and can have the connotation that the person has been "judged" as living a moral life, relative to religious doctrines. Rectitude, often a synonym for righteousness, is about personal moral values and the internal compass that guides an individual’s decisions and actions.
Etymology
Etymologically, it comes from Old English rihtwis, from riht 'right' + wīs 'manner, state, condition' (as opposed to wikt:wrangwīs, "wrongful").
William Tyndale (translator of the Bible into Early Modern English in 1526) created the modern spelling of righteousness after rihtwis, which would have yielded modern English right wise or right ways. He used it to translate the Hebrew root צדק tzedek, which appears over five hundred times in the Hebrew Bible, and the Greek word δίκαιος (dikaios), which appears approximately 80 times in the New Testament. This change in the ending of the word in the 16th century was due to association with words such as bounteous.
Ethics or moral philosophy
Ethics is a major branch of philosophy that investigates questions about morality.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Righteousness” as quality of being morally correct and justifiable. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as quality of being morally correct and justifiable. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1144825. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1526.
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This entry incorporates text from “Righteousness” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.