17th Annual PhilFEST
17th PhilFEST on 1 May 2026
PhilFEST is the highlight of our undergraduate community’s life in which honors students present their research in 15-20 minute presentations followed by a public Q&A. This year, an audience of almost 40 persons—faculty from inside and outside the department, students, graduate students, and interested listeners at large—listened to and then discussed our students’ presentations of their research results. The projects presented were, in the order of appearance:
Jackson Lazar Stein: The Limits of Standard Cost Benefit Analysis: The Case of Aviation (Supervisor: Chad Horne)
In the modern business world, the application of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in safety-critical sectors, such as aviation, is morally indefensible. We should not give up on CBA completely, instead, we should use deontological ethics to guide the current framework. CBA should then be adjusted to fit these limits so that companies and organizations can use it to find the best way to run their businesses. Standard cost-benefit analysis diminishes values to mere variables, as quantifiable risk becomes assignable a price, and individuals are rendered interchangeable units of welfare. I use Seth Baum's analysis of value typology to show how combining values into variables changes modern methods for optimizing economics. I contend that, informed by business ethicists like Joseph Heath, Kenneth Arrow, and John Rawls, high-risk corporate decisions necessitate the consideration of constraints that uphold both deontological principles and fundamental human rights. Joseph Heath explains that CBA is not defensible in its standard form because of six institutional limits: domain limitation, pareto efficiency, liberal neutrality, wealth corrected preferences, output filters, and rights-based overrides. These limits all work together to stop welfare aggregation from taking precedence over individual freedoms and claims. I assert that safeguards should be obligatory for private enterprises, exemplified by the Boeing 737 MAX disasters, which demonstrate the consequences of unregulated cost-benefit analysis. In "Bounded CBA," I suggest a framework that uses deontological ethics as a way to screen decisions about catastrophic risk, lack of transparency, or non-consensual harm, to make sure that they are not influenced by economic factors. I hold that cost-benefit analysis (CBA) should be limited to parameters that allow for morally acceptable alternatives.
Veronica Rubin: Is the Trad-Wife Actually Woke? What a Recent Trend of Influencer Culture Reveals (Supervisor: Claire Kirwin)
Trad wives, short for traditional wives, are a newfound internet phenomenon where women post and monetize their domestic labor across social media platforms. The subject of heated debate, many decry these women as reversing the progress of feminism. My thesis paper argues that there is something valuable that feminists can take away from the trad wife phenomenon before it’s dismissed entirely. Domestic labor is a valuable pursuit that can contribute to women—and indeed people who are not women—leading good lives, conducive to their individual flourishing. The trad wife accesses the goods of domestic labor in unique ways; however the manner in which she accesses them is complicated by how she monetizes them, how she performs them, and how she influences how others can access them. These distinctions are important for reframing discussions about how domestic labor is societally valued and could inform political movements and objectives for compensating domestic labor.
Nora Schilling: Practices of Environmental Virtue: Nature Writing and the Experiencing of Others (Supervisor: Chad Horne)
This interdisciplinary thesis bridges philosophy and literature to explore how Nature writing can guide us towards environmental virtue. Building from Aristotelian virtue ethics, I argue that Nature writers are exemplars of environmental virtue because they display two qualities I call self-suspension and affective attention. Using Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals as literary case studies, I demonstrate the powerful presence and consequences of self-suspended affective attention in works of Nature writing, with a focus on how reading Nature writing can virtuously orient one toward otherness.