A Last Farewell to 2021 — Introduction to Issue 1: Morality
2021 has been a rough year. We could go on talking about our lives “amid these unprecedented times”, but I’ll spare you the details since you were there too. It was bad. Really bad.
Still, this year wasn’t a complete dud. There were small moments of happiness, even if they were surrounded by days upon days of nothingness. And maybe that’s something that will never change. Maybe it’s inevitable that the boring days will go on to become boring weeks and boring months. That the good days will show up less and less often. But we can still try to enjoy the good days when they come.
And at least, that’s what I’m telling myself as I write this introduction at 7:54 PM on the 31st of December, 2021. Today is a good day (the first in a while), and that’s because I can introduce you to the first issue of Conundrum. It’s rough around the edges. It’s pretty empty. But it’s done.
We’ve collected some articles our members have written about one central theme: Morality. We each took the theme in different ways. One of us wrote about morality in the context of religion, and discussed the “Problem of Evil”, the perennial question as to how God can exist in a clearly sinful world. That writer decided to spin that question on its head, and used the Problem of Evil to prove God’s existence.
Another of us took the lens of different philosophers, providing different answers to the questions that bring many people to philosophy in the first place: "Is what I’m doing right? How can I make the world better than how I found it?”
One article covered Psychological Egoism, the idea that all our actions and motivations, no matter how good they seem, are really motivated by our own pure self-interest. Finally, our last article discusses how we can create morality without believing in morals in the first place.
These are a wide range of topics, held together only by a loose theme of morality. So take a look at whichever ones you find interesting. If you enjoy it, read another one. If you don’t, then I’d like to apologize for wasting your time. But I’d also ask that, if you find our arguments weak or the topic uninteresting, that you help us fix that. You don’t have to know much about the history of philosophy to have thoughts about important questions. This journal is meant to be an introduction, both for readers and writers, to understanding the field of philosophy, and the many questions and (fewer) answers that it contains. So if you’re interested, check out the About page on our website, and think about joining the team. In the meantime, enjoy our first ever issue of Conundrum!