Not much is known about the antecedents of ethical leadership and ethical leadership derailment. Yet, as the recent financial crisis and other past events have shown, business leaders continue to experience ethical lapses resulting in their professional derailment while compromising the future of others. To understand ethical derailment better, this paper develops a framework that draws upon normative ethics and strengths theory to show an antecedent relationship between a leader’s character strengths and their ethical leadership behavior. The proposed framework represents the first to examine the relationships between character strengths, ethical leadership, and leadership derailment behavior.