Dr. Kenneth Silver

Dr. Silver is an Associate Professor in Business Ethics within Trinity Business School and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He teaches courses on ethical conduct both within and outside of the marketplace. Dr. Silver researches on an array of cross-disciplinary topics relevant to appropriate business conduct, exploring questions about what corporations are, what they are for, and the extent of their responsibilities and rights. Dr. Silver graduated with a Bachelors degree in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Southern California with the dissertation, ""The Constitution of Action." After his doctorate, and before taking up his current position, Dr. Silver was a Dornsife Preceptor at the University of Southern California, teaching a class on whether corporations are people.

  Business Ethics   corporate personhood   METAPHYSICS   PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION

The background of my research is within analytic philosophy, where my dissertation was in the philosophy of action and on the question of how to distinguish an action from a mere body movement. For the past five years, however, the core of my research has involved using this background in agency and responsibility to think in particular about corporate agency, or the question of whether corporations act and are responsible in some way distinctly from their employees. This has pushed me towards an eclectic and interdisciplinary approach, making contributions across philosophy, business ethics and management scholarship. At times, I leverage work from within subfields of philosophy to directly address questions of corporate agency. For example, I have applied the work on moral status within ethics to the question of corporate personhood; I have applied work on reasons in metaethics to the question of how corporations can act for reasons; I have applied work on answerability in the responsibility literature to the question of whether firms should be held responsibility in the criminal law via respondeat superior. At other times, this emphasis on corporations and the social world has led me to make contributions directly in philosophical subfields. For example, recognizing how firms must instantiate weakness of will, I have published a paper on how we can act weakly out of habit; I have used the context of the social world to publish a new conception of emergence in the philosophy of science; I have argued that certain regular occurrences in the corporate world can be used to argue for the existence of backwards causation in the metaphysics literature. And apart from these, I continue to make contributions on core questions across these fields, maintaining a stake in disparate debates and finding new ways to bridge these areas.