Kenneth Silver

As an Assistant Professor in Business Ethics, Kenneth Silver 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.

Kenneth Silver graduated with a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Southern California. His dissertation, “The Constitution of Action,” explored how to think about the actions of individuals, and most of his current research focuses on how to think about the actions of corporations. Should we say that corporations have reasons and act in response to them? Should we say that corporations act directly themselves, or that their employees act on their behalf? Can corporations suffer from weakness of will just as we do? By exploring these questions, broadly on the topic of corporate personhood, Dr. Silver argues for a view on which corporations can be responsible for bad conduct and should be held responsible.

Dr. Silver also researches on a range of questions in the adjacent fields of financial ethics, strategic management, and metaphysics. For example, Dr. Silver has work on the question of whether corporations owe their shareholders the price of equity derived from intrinsic value calculations, on why the concept of competitive advantage is best understood as a disposition of firms to succeed relative to peers, and on how we can be responsible for our omissions.