Habitual Virtue

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
― William James Durant (discussing Aristotle's ethics), The Story of Philosophy (1926)

Ethical dilemmas, such as the classic "trolley problem", present us with a decision, a series of options to be deliberated over and chosen between. After making our hypothetical choice, we can then inspect the implicit values at play, and either adjust our choice, or else affirm our choice and those implicit values. Much of modern ethical theory fixates on these deliberations, unfortunately.

The vast majority of life is not deliberative, but habitual.

Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and [deliberative thinking] is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for [automatic responses] in making routine decisions.
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

We make most of our decisions by habit, not by deliberation ― the cost of pausing and deeply considering is too high to be used ubiquitously. This does not mean deliberation is unimportant. When we encounter a novel situation, or if previous habitual actions have proven precarious, we are likely to spend the effort to deliberate, so that hopefully the course is set right in similar future situations.

Deliberation serves to guide habituation, but not every deliberative preference can be habituated.

For nature without learning is a blind thing, and learning without nature is an imperfect thing, and practice without both is an ineffective thing.
― Plutarch, Moralia (1c. CE)

If we, during deliberation, gather a multitude of context-specific facts, or follow an elaborate multi-stage decision process, then the decision we reach might be effective, but it will not seep into our nature. If instead we deliberate with a selection of heuristics, with candidate "rules of thumb" that call out to us as intuitive, then the choice is far more likely to improve our intuitive choices in the future.

Our minds are not blank slates. The peculiarities of our nature cannot be strong-armed away by sheer force of will or thought. Rather, we should think of our habitual decision process as if it were an eager child ― talk to it simply, and coax it into action. In deliberating, we are a manager of our own selves, and we should not abuse that authority to trample on our instinctual nature.

The path of virtue is not self-negation, but self-transformation.

The man who does not enjoy doing noble actions is not a good man at all.
― Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (4c. BCE)

This is the key insight of virtue ethics: Ethical deliberations are the means to cultivate virtue, not the ends. A focus only on the direct consequences of deliberate decisions misses the transformative potential of ethics, which contains most of the value.

If instead we ask ethical questions in the language of our emotional nature ― when should we hate and when should we forgive, when should we love and when should we part ways ― then in an instant the language of virtues offers us answers ― it offers courage, and charity, and respect, and a host of other concepts from somewhere deep within. We call them virtues, and yes, they seem fuzzy at first. But they are not fuzzy because they have been sloppily passed down from generation to generation ― they are fuzzy because our grasp of our own selves is messy at best.

When we ask and answer in accordance with our nature, only then can we start to bring our nature into harmony with whatever Good actually is.

The Good cannot simply be chosen, rather the Good must be lived, every day.

...no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle, it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.
― CS Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)