Abstract

The virtue development literature often draws on the language of goal-directed automaticity and flow states in discussions of virtue. This article examines the attentional features of various virtues and argues that only some virtuous actions can be adequately described in these terms. It proposes a distinction between three kinds of virtuous actions—flow state actions, deliberative actions, and presence actions—which have varying attentional features, bodily reliance, and conscious reasoning in virtue performance. Then the article motivates these distinctions as important, describing how one might take on-board these classifications in character education, providing a more tailored development of virtues.