henry bugbee starts talking about ethics. At this time, he was teaching a course in ethics and this preoccuppied his thinking until October 18, 1952 in his journal. Bugbee claims that ethical inquiry (define) is difficult. This difficulty is due to an issue central to ethical reflection (define). The issue is how can we understand attitudes during ethical reflection or the situation that moves us to action? Usually, when faced with situations requiring action, we summon knowledge we possess to use to inform our action. Bugbee asks whether we do the same thing to the pursuit of the meaning of life. When we inquire about human well-being, can we summon the experience to help us answer our inquiry? If such experience is immediately acessible, shouldn we not use it to ensure our own well-being?
Bugbee proposes that two questions come together:
- What are the conditions of our acting as we ought?
- How is it possible to establish intimacy with these conditions in our concern to understand them reflectively?
Since justified action does not occur by following correct procedures, we cannot understand it by following a proper method of inquiry. Bugbee argues that we cannot treat them like objects and think about them as such. He calls them meta-technical and meta-objective.
Here, I am exposed to the difficulties that preoccupy those who adhere to Moral realism like Bugbee. In Error theory, what Bugbee describes is a component of what makes the claimed metaphysical status of morality “weird.” If they resist representation and control and they are different from what our minds typically comprehend, do we even have access to them? I am perhaps getting ahead of myself, but I have a gut feel that this is when I’ll eventually end up in commenting on what Bugbee will be talking about in the upcoming days.