Claim. Because each of the four positions in the family four-position foundation has three object partners, love takes twelve distinct directional forms, and each form requires its own corresponding virtue.
Elaboration. Lee derives a precise combinatorial structure for ethical virtues (I. Divine Principle Foundation for Ethics). God’s love is absolute but manifests divisionally according to position and direction: parents’ love is downward, conjugal love is horizontal, children’s love is upward. When you multiply four positions (grandparent/God, father, mother, children) by three object partners each, you get twelve directional kinds of love, each with a different nuance — grandparent-to-father differs from grandparent-to-grandchild, mother-to-husband differs from mother-to-child, and so on.
The theological move here is to argue that virtue language must track this directional structure rather than being a generic list of character traits. Filial piety, benevolence, conjugal fidelity, and sibling care are not interchangeable items on a virtue checklist but are tied to specific directional loves within the family geometry. This is why Lee’s later sections distinguish vertical virtues (benevolence, filial piety) from horizontal virtues (conjugal love, sibling love) — the taxonomy is dictated by the four-position structure itself.
The claim has consequences for how ethics is taught: rather than abstractly cultivating ‘virtue,’ one cultivates the specific virtue appropriate to one’s position and the object partner one is facing. It also means an unmarried or childless person literally cannot exercise certain virtues — conjugal love and parental love are unavailable in their proper form, making marriage and family not merely socially desirable but ethically constitutive. Critics from individualist ethical traditions would push back here: the framework appears to make full ethical personhood contingent on family role-fulfillment, which is doctrinally consistent with UC theology but philosophically contested.
See also. three-divine-principle-foundations-for-ethics, downward-love-primary-induces-upward-and-horizontal, four-great-realms-of-heart-grow-developmentally