When we experience an ethical realisation, we are discovering that an ethical principle (or a more specific principle that is meant to be an expression of it) that we hold has lost its congruence with who we are.
Being a realisation, this can occur almost instantly, an experience not unlike the flick of a switch turning a light on.
The implementation though, resembles more a winding path than a sudden switch. To implement ethical realisations, we need to keep an eye on our habits and gradually change them as they arise, especially they reveal their incongruity with our evolving sense of ethics.
Perhaps the term moral sense is more appropriate here, given its link to the Latin word for habit or custom (’mos’), from which the English word mores is derived. At the heart of this relation is the idea of repeated action, of a habit. We translate ethical realisations to more concrete moral applications through an ongoing assessment of our habits (how we typically act in certain situations or react to them).
So we draw our habitual responses to the world back into the surface and away from their normally subconscious state. Our intention is to evaluate whether they still align with our evolved sense of ethics. After all, habits are meant to unburden our minds from the effort of repeated decision-making in familiar situations. They are relegated to the subconscious while our conscious decision-making can save resources for other less predictable situations.
It is far from a linear process. At times, the incongruence of a habit might be flashing in front of our faces and we still might fail to see it, even though we would be infinitely grateful if we could.
So, again we transgress the very ethical principles that we wish we could honour. And in the eyes of others, we are tragicomically left to apologise for our mistakes, promising them that this is not who we really are.