Schedule of Events

The common good is defined in terms of social goods and arrangements that are beneficial to the whole community and their collective well-being, and has long been regarded as a central aim of governance. However, persistent challenges such as competing interests call into question whether a unified conception of the common good is attainable, and if so, how it might be realized.
The purpose of this paper is to argue for the incorporation of care as a fundamental principle in conceptualizing the common good. While justice has historically been treated as a primary component, this paper contends that care is not only compatible with justice but essential to fully realizing it.
To develop this argument, the paper employs normative and conceptual analysis, drawing on insights from care ethics and broader traditions in political philosophy. It examines the relationship between care and justice and develops an account of care as both a value and a practice. The analysis shows that centering care provides a more coherent and inclusive framework for understanding the common good by emphasizing attentiveness, interdependence, and responsiveness to need. Ultimately, this reconceptualization of the common good through the lens of care, as both a value and a practice, provides a stronger framework for promoting collective well-being.

This paper analyzes grief through different philosophical perspectives, and makes the argument that grief should not be understood as a condition to eliminate or overcome, but as a necessary and meaningful process through which individuals adapt to loss. Drawing on the work of Michael Cholbi, René Descartes, and Epictetus, it examines grief as both a transformation of relationships and an embodied emotional response rooted in human attachment. These philosophical accounts are supplemented by psychological perspectives and phenomenological insights, particularly from Joan Didion, which highlight the immediacy and unpredictability of lived grief. Together, these approaches suggest that although grief can become overwhelming when it lingers in a way that prevents us from adapting to loss, it is not pathological in itself, but an essential process through which individuals come to understand loss, preserve meaning, and gradually reorient themselves within a changed world.

By fragmenting our attention and disconnecting us from nature, technology disembodies and alienates us from ourselves and the world around us, leading to a loss of meaning, the self, and a flattening of experience. Throughout this capstone I will be analyzing how addictive technology hijacks our attention and diminishes our capacity for presence, how the weakening human-nature connection is harming our wellbeing, and how the language we use and the stories we tell shape the way we perceive the world. We must reclaim our attention, rebuild our connection with the natural world, and reframe the stories we tell about our relationship to the earth.

Doping in sport is widely understood as cheating that undermines fairness and the integrity of competition. However, this assumption obscures deeper ethical tensions, particularly in women’s athletics, where questions of gender, bodily regulation, and unequal access complicate traditional evaluations. The purpose of this project is to contribute to philosophical discussions of sport by offering a critical re-evaluation of dominant anti-doping frameworks and developing a more adequate explanatory account of their limitations. The method used is conceptual analysis and philosophical argumentation, through which this paper examines key concepts such as fairness, autonomy, and the “spirit of sport,” alongside arguments both for and against doping. This analysis demonstrates that these frameworks rely on the false assumption of a level playing field and fail to account for structural inequalities in sport. These failures are most visible in women’s sports, where anti-doping enforcement intersects with gender bias and increased regulation of female bodies. The paper concludes that current anti-doping ethics are internally inconsistent and require reconsideration in light of these overlooked dimensions in women’s sports. 

I argue that an analysis of Jesus’ life and teachings reveals a virtue ethical morality that grounds the ethical life in the formation of character, rather than isolated actions, rules, or consequences. Within this framework, I suggest that Jesus Christ as a model of moral perfection is a moral exemplar who sets a concrete standard toward by which human character is formed and regulated. This presentation contends that love, understood not merely as action but as the foundation of one’s character, constitutes the core of moral formation. This love, however, is not self-defined and instead is grounded first in the love of God, through which one’s character is refined towards righteousness. Ethical life, then, is not primarily a matter of external adherence, but of becoming aligned with the standard embodied by Jesus, which is founded on love. By addressing objections to this demanding ideal and distinguishing it from an alternative account of love, the presentation reveals that such a framework is both coherent and necessary for individual moral development and the flourishing of society.

The term “Indian” continues to shape how entire populations are perceived and governed, making it crucial to examine how a single colonial misnomer still structures identity, power, and representation today.This presentation argues that “Indian” is not a neutral descriptor but a colonial construct that produces epistemic violence, while also exploring how Indigenous and South Asian communities negotiate, resist, and reinterpret this imposed identity. This project uses a theoretical and comparative framework, drawing on Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to analyze naming as a mechanism of power. It combines: discourse analysis of the term “Indian” across historical and cultural contexts; comparative analysis of Indigenous and South Asian experiences; and critical theory to examine how language produces identity, misrecognition, and possibilities for resistance. 

In "Oppression as Dehumanization", I provide an analytic philosophical rebuttal to an important claim in Iris Marion Young's seminal article "The Five Faces of Oppression." Here, she claims that one definition of oppression cannot be given that captures a unifying feature of all cases of oppression. I argue against that claim with the tools of conceptual analysis, providing such a definition of oppression. The one unifying feature of all cases of oppression, I argue, is dehumanization. Specifically, I show that dehumanization is both constitutive of oppression and functions as a necessary precursor for oppression. I do this by defining two aspects of oppression, internal and external, and then show how these aspects function both as the precursor and the consequential harm. I use both forms in conjunction with the five faces Young illustrates to show how dehumanization is not only the unifying feature of these faces but how internal dehumanization creates the conditions that give rise to those five faces.

In this capstone, I conduct a metaethical analysis of Divine Voluntarism, tracing its evolution from the classical Euthyphro Dilemma to contemporary interpretations. My primary objective is to evaluate whether modern modifications to Divine Voluntarism, also known as Divine Command Theory (DCT), successfully navigate the "Arbitrariness Objection"—the concern that if ethics relies solely on God’s commands, God could command anything, even cruelty, and it would become an objective, normative standard of rightness. I ultimately conclude that even through appeals to the character of God or a more preferential account of God’s commands, modern Divine Command Theory still fails to provide a sound or experientially relevant account of metaethics.