Despite the prevalence of the virtue of considerateness in everyday moral discourse and the proliferation of philosophical studies of virtue language, considerateness hardly ever appears on philosophical agendas. When discussed in academia, its meaning seems fuzzy and unclear. This article makes amends for this gap by subjecting considerateness to conceptual scrutiny. The author argues that considerateness designates a cluster concept, encompassing three types of virtuousness that share a family resemblance only. One is a hybrid civic-moral social-glue virtue, extensionally equivalent to Aristotle's virtue of agreeableness. The second is an intellectual virtue of phronetic consideration (moral sensitivity and integration). The third is a full-fledged discrete moral virtue with standard Aristotelian features of a golden-mean structure and an emotional component as a motivator. The advantages of identifying these three types of virtuousness are elicited, as are some of the educational ramifications of analyzing the differentia of considerateness in this way.

Perfectionism has been argued to have both positive and negative aspects. Negative perfectionism has a robust positive correlation with psychopathology. This study explored the personality pattern of a group of clinical participants and a group of athletes in relation to positive and negative perfectionism. The results indicated negative perfectionism is related to neuroticism and agreeableness in both clinical and non-clinical groups. Negative perfectionism was most strongly associated with low agreeableness but had no significant relationship with conscientiousness or extraversion in the clinical sample. In the athlete sample, higher negative perfectionism was most strongly related to higher neuroticism but was also associated with lower extraversion and conscientiousness. In order to more fully understand these relationships and their clinical implications, more studies using validated measures of positive and negative perfectionism with larger samples are required. It would be useful to determine if personality factors of agreeableness and competence could be increased in order to ameliorate the distress associated with negative perfectionism.

The study investigated if the degree of personality pathology among people with clinical levels of social anxiety disorder was similar to those with personality disorders more generally, if the degree of avoidant personality pathology was correlated positively with Neuroticism and negatively with Extraversion and facets of Agreeableness (particularly Trust), and finally if scores on the relevant personality dimensions improve from pre- to post-treatment. Changes in Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Agreeableness were examined following group treatment for social anxiety disorder. The current study employed a within-subjects repeated-measures design (N = 25) to investigate whether these traits can be changed by group treatment for social anxiety disorder. A measure of personality disorder pathology was found to correlate positively with Neuroticism and negatively with Agreeableness in the absence of significant relationships with other Five-Factor Model traits. Treatment was associated with significant reductions in Neuroticism and there was significant improvement of the Trust facet of Agreeableness. These results are discussed in terms of the way that group treatment for Social Anxiety Disorder may be enhanced.