I ran across this graphic from a paper called Character and Leadership: Situating Servant Leadership in A Proposed Virtues Framework, co-authored by Jim Lanctot and Dr. Justin Irving. Something about it immediately tingled my “clear thinking sense” (like Spidey sense, but more cerebral), so of course I had to investigate. The paper itself, I discovered, wasn’t badly done. It presents a reasonable layout of what may be considered basic virtues, not necessarily the ones I consider most important, but definitely virtues. It also provides reasonable definitions for those virtues. What bothered me about it was the chart of “The Virtue Continuum.”
Here is the figure:
Some problems stand out. It is hard to see how one could have an excess of integrity, or how such an excess would lead to legalism. Wouldn’t legalism be the result of an overly enthusiastic respect of the rules, in other words, an insufficient respect for persons? The last item, courage, may indeed lead to foolhardiness, but if temperance is the practice of moderation, how is strictness due to too much temperance?
[Continue reading at Chiefy's Word.]
