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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.

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.