The focus on character is about building the capacity to follow through on the proper actions. Someone might be too scared, too weak-willed, or too apathetic to do the right thing, even if they know what to do. Becoming virtuous is an investment in moral capital, making the person more capable of taking the right action in the future.

I take it that you are talking about "training the elephant"*? If you took that to be one of the main points in virtue ethics as argued by The Happiness Hypothesis, then I agree. One of the biggest effects in my shift towards virtue effect has been that I've began constantly evaluating all my actions (and thoughts!) in light of virtue and self-improvement, instead of only having ethics come into place in relatively rare situations. I think this may have been a bit more clear in the original post that Will linked to.

(*: For those who haven't read The Happiness Hypothesis:

One of the points the book makes that we're divided beings: to use the book's metaphor, there is an elephant and there is the rider. The rider is the conscious self, while the elephant consists of all the low-level, unconscious processes. Unconscious processes actually carry out most of what we do and the rider trains them and tells them what they should be doing. Think of e.g. walking or typing on the computer, where you don't explicitly think about every footstep or every press of the button, but instead just decide to walk somewhere or type in something. Readers familiar with PJ Eby will recognize this to be the same as his Multiple Self philosophy.)

From my original post:

So far, I'm not sure of the permanence of this effect. I've previously had feelings of major personal change that sooner or later ended up fading (several of them which are chronicled in this LJ). The rider may get what feels like a major revelation, but the elephant is still running the show, and it needs to be trained over an extended period for there to be any lasting change. So since yesterday, I've been doing my best to keep watch over my thoughts and practice detachment from world-states.

I have the questionable luck of having an easy way of practicing this: I have rashes that frequently make my skin itch. On a couple of occasions, I've tried meditation and the practice of simply passively observing any thoughts and feelings that come to mind until they go away on their own. I began applying that technique to the feeling of itchy skin, and it felt like I was able to ignore the feeling for longer. During the night, I woke up to the feeling of an itch, and on previous nights when that happened I'd been forced to either scratch my skin half to death or get up and apply several layers of moisturizer on it. This time around, even though I did end up scratching it a bit, I was eventually able to fall back to sleep without doing either of those. Also, I believe I was able to some degree detach myself from the feeling of discomfort that I got while I was jogging this morning and getting physically tired. (Not completely, mind you, but to some degree.)

On the less physical front, I've been trying to keep an eye on my thoughts and modify them whenever they didn't really suit the new scheme I'm trying to run. For instance, I noticed that one of my motivations for writing this post was to win the approval of other people who might be interested in this kind of thing or who might admire my skill in introspection or detachment. When I noticed that thought pattern, I attempted to modify it to become more rooted in personal virtue: I am writing this post in order to gain better insight into my transformation, to provide useful or interesting data for others, and so forth. Both introspective insight and voluntarily contributing to humanity's shared reserves of information are virtuous by themselves. I do not need to involve into it the "people's evaluation of me" part, which belongs to my model of the external world and to my model of myself.