Human virtues and defects
These notes on human characteristics, intended as virtues and defects, have been written as an attempt to find some criteria for an objective evaluation of individuals.
I must say that I’m not a psychologyst and that I have no experience in this field; after a very limited search on this subject, I didn’t find any books that contained such a list, or that even talked about human characteristics in terms of virtues and defects.
All the books I have seen that talk about analyzing human characteristics, do this with the goal of defining a psychological profile of the individual, without saying however what can be considered "good" (a virtue) or "bad" (a defect).
The only attempts in this direction come either from religion or from "rating and performance" evaluation tools, used by some companies to rank their employees.
I’m not interested in these forms of evaluation; what I wanted to know was if an individual can be classified in terms of his strengths or weaknesses related to how well he interacts with other people.
In fact, my list is mainly dedicated to analyzing the characteristics that could be important in choosing a partner or a friend. However, I’m considering here only those characteristics that can be classified either as a virtue or a defect.
In other terms, things like hobbies or personal interests are not included, since it’s impossible to say if a particular sport, job or pastime is better than another.
Some features, like Beauty and health, can be hardly classified as virtues, but nonetheless they are important factors when we look for a partner, and to some extent they can be measured; for these reasons they are included.
| Honesty, rectitude, integrity |
| Sincerity |
| Goodness |
| Integrity |
| Generosity |
| Sense of justice, equity |
| Modesty |
| Loyalty |
| Willingness to work hard |
| Adaptability: going together well, being able to deal with change and difficulties |
| Listening capacity: understanding other’s problems or teachings, trying to accommodate other’s desires |
| Communication skills: being able to talk about our feelings |
| Communication skills: being good at talking and developing durable relationships with others |
| Sensibility: caring for others, being sympathetic and in touch with our own feelings |
| Kindness |
| Tolerance, of other people’s ideas and behaviors |
| Naturalness: speaking and behaving in a natural way, absence of formality |
| Good temper, Enthusiasm |
| Being funny, ability to make other people laugh and amuse themselves |
| Gratefulness: being able to appreciate what others do for our good |
| Willingness to help others |
| Politeness, courtesy, respect of other people |
| Friendlyness: being pleasant toward other people |
| Being able to consider other people success without being jealous or envious |
| Calmness, serenity |
| Being able to resolve conflicts with others |
| Flexibility: capacity to negotiate and renounce to some of our desires |
| Respect for other people feelings and ideas |
| Respect for things |
| Respect for animals |
| Respect for the environment |
| Being touchy and irritable |
| Reliability: capacity to complete assignments with varying degrees of difficulty, but with minimal external help and with consistent results. Includes punctuality |
| Independency: being able to think with our own head, not being easy influenced by others |
| Being determined, resolute, positive |
| Being ambitious, in the positive sense: setting goals to achieve and dedicating our best energies to them. |
| Creativity, imagination: capacity of forging new ideas |
| Tenacity, strength |
| Self control, capacity to behave under stress and to react to sudden difficulties |
| Courage, endurance |
| Being organized and disciplined |
| Beauty, physical attractiveness, allure |
| Sex appeal |
| Charm, class |
| Cleanliness, taking care of our body |
| Dressing capacity: ability to choose and wear clothes appropriated to out personality |
| Good health |
| Ability in sports |
| Being clever, intelligent, sound, rational |
| Being good at manual work |
| Culture |
| Good taste |
| Being a good parent, dealing well with children |
| Being rich |
| Having a good job, being socially elevated |