Excellence requires discipline of mind and body, for consistency is essential to being really good. So too with moral virtues. Children need rules and external control, like craftsmen learning their trade, and the continuous discipline develops good habits. But this applies also to adults: a woman who at cost to herself repeatedly chooses to help those in need and makes such beneficence her general rule, begins to experience benevolent dispositions. Practices like these—thoughtful, intentional, habitual, even rule directed—shape virtue.
