Virtue ethics requires ongoing vigilance even after habits become automatic

Evidence

Yet it would be a mistake to say that mosque participants believe that once a virtue has taken root in one’s disposition, it issues forth perfunctorily and automatically. Since the point is not simply tha one acts virtuously but also how one enacts a virtue (with what intent, emotion, commitment, and so forth), constant vigilance and monitoring of one’s practices is a critical element in this tradi.. tion of ethical formation. This economy of self..discipline therefore draws at.. tention to the role self..directed action plays in the learning of an embodied disposition and its relationship to “unconscious” ways of being. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 964

Categorization

• QUESTION: How does continuous monitoring coexist with automaticity — does the mosque tradition hold both simultaneously without contradiction?
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that freedom-from-reflection is achieved through and sustained by constant self-directed reflection is dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: connects to: Sustained simulation of virtue may become indistinguishable from real virtue — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1967