A journal is an argument in the form of a habit. To revive one is to accept both the argument and the discipline — to keep writing about what ethics requires of us in context, even when context keeps changing faster than we can read.
C4eJ — the Centre for Ethics Journal — ran for several years as the house organ of a university project on ethics, publishing essays, symposia, reviews, and occasional interventions on questions that mattered and that did not obviously belong to any one academic department. It paused. Under the present masthead it resumes.
What stays the same
The subtitle of the journal — Ethics in Context — is the one editorial commitment we have held over from the earlier run, and the one we intend to keep. We are not persuaded by the view that moral philosophy proceeds best when it is most abstract. Our experience has been that the hardest moral questions arrive with a history, an institutional form, and a set of particular lives caught inside them. A journal that wants to think about those questions needs to take the context seriously.
Accordingly we mean to continue publishing essays that refuse the convenient divisions between philosophy and law, between ethics and politics, between argument and reportage. We publish short pieces. We ask them to take a position. We want them to be readable by people who are serious but not specialists.
What we are doing with the old work
The archive of the earlier run is substantial — several hundred pieces, published over years, cited in the compact form [YYYY C4eJ N] that we are keeping. It would be a scholarly harm to let that record disappear.
Our policy is to restore the work we can restore — the text as it stood, the citations as they were printed, the authors named as authors. Where an author or literary estate would prefer a different arrangement, we will be pleased to hear from them.
What we are doing with the new work
Slowly. A small journal is not improved by bulk. We will publish when we have something to publish — essays, symposia convened around a question that rewards several voices, reviews of books and exhibitions we think readers ought to know about, occasional editorial notes.
We will not publish pieces written by a machine. We will not let a machine draft editorial copy in our voice. We do not think this is a difficult commitment to keep; we think it is the minimum a journal of ethics owes its readers.
An invitation
If the old journal’s work mattered to you, or if the subtitle Ethics in Context names something you recognise in your own thinking, we would like to hear from you. The submissions page describes what we publish and how to send it. The about page describes the scope in more detail. The archive is the full record.
And thank you for reading. It is — still — the thing that makes a journal a journal.