Dr. Kenneth Silver

• Kenneth Silver, Can a Corporation Be Worthy of Moral Consideration?, Journal of Business Ethics, 159, (1), 2019, p253 - 265Journal Article, 2019, DOI , URL
• Kenneth Silver, Omissions: Agency, Metaphysics, and Responsibility, by Randolph Clarke, Mind, 124, (496), 2015, p1264 - 1268Review Article, 2015, DOI
• Kenneth Silver, Do I Think Corporations Should Be Able to Vote Now?, Business Ethics Journal Review, 6, (4), 2018, p16 - 23Journal Article, 2018, DOI , URL
• Kenneth Silver, The Vague Time of a Killing, Philosophical Studies, 175, (6), 2018, p1383 - 1400Journal Article, 2018, DOI , URL
• Kenneth Silver, Avoiding Late Preemption with the Right Kind of Influence, Philosophia, 47, (4), 2019, p1297 - 1312Journal Article, 2019, DOI , URL
• Kenneth Silver, Habitual Weakness, Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 8, (4), 2019, p270 - 277Journal Article, 2019, DOI , URL
• Kenneth Silver, Omissions as Events and Actions, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 4, (1), 2018, p33 - 48Journal Article, 2018, DOI , URL
• Ron Artstein, Kenneth Silver, Ethics for a combined human-machine dialogue agent, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Spring Conference Series, Stanford, 2016, 2016Conference Paper, 2016, URL
• Kenneth Silver, Competitive Advantage as a Disposition, Academy of Management Proceedings, Academy of Management Annual Conference, 08/2019, 2019, (1), 2019Published Abstract, 2019, URL
• Kenneth Silver, Modern Portfolio Theory and Shareholder Primacy, Business Ethics Journal Review, 7, (6), 2019, p34 - 39Journal Article, 2019, URL
• Kenneth Silver, Group Weakness, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 01/2020, 2020Published Abstract, 2020, URL
• Kenneth Silver, The Value of Corporate Criminal Responsibility, Society for Business Ethics 2019 Annual Conference, 08/2019, 2019Oral Presentation, 2019
• Kenneth Silver, Paul Garofalo, The State of Nature and Excusing Corporate Wrongdoing, Society for Business Ethics 2019 Annual Conference, Boston, 2019Oral Presentation, 2019
• Kenneth Silver, Group Weakness, Book Workshop on Stephanie Collins' Group Duties, University College Dublin Center for Ethics & Public Life, 2019Oral Presentation, 2019
• Kenneth Silver, How to Not Rule Out the Market Failures Approach, 26th International Vincentian Business Ethics Conference, Dublin Institute of Technology, 2019Oral Presentation, 2019
• Kenneth Silver, Strategy (Part I): Conceptual Foundations, Philosophy Compass, 2020Journal Article, 2020, DOI , URL
• Wronging by Requesting in, editor(s)Mark Timmons , Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 11, Oxford University Press, 2021, [N. G. Laskowski, Kenneth Silver]Book Chapter, 2021
• Kenneth Silver, The Constitution of Action, 2020Working Paper, 2020
• Kenneth Silver, Emergence within Social Systems, Synthese, 199, (3-4), 2021, p7865 - 7887Journal Article, 2021, DOI , URL
• Kenneth Silver, Backwards Causation as Actual, Albeit Institutional, 2020Working Paper, 2020
• Kenneth Silver, Causal Exclusion and Ontic Vagueness, Austalasian Journal of Philosophy, 2020Journal Article, 2020, DOI , URL
• Kenneth Silver, What's Immoral About Investing in Immoral Corporations?, 2020Working Paper, 2020
• Kenneth Silver, Respondeat Superior and the Criminal Law: To Whom Should the Master Answer?, Criminal Theory Conference Workshop, online, 2021, 2021Oral Presentation, 2021
• Kenneth Silver, Markets Within the Limit of Feasibility, Journal of Business Ethics, 182, 2023, p1087 - 1101Journal Article, 2023, DOI , URL , TARA - Full Text
• Kenneth Silver, Greg Filetto, Fair Decisions, Hard and Soft, Algorithmic Fairness Workshop, online, 2020Oral Presentation, 2020
• Kenneth Silver, Group Action without Group Minds, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 104, (2), 2022, p321 - 342Journal Article, 2022, DOI , URL
• Kenneth Silver, When Should the Master Answer?: Respondeat Superior and the Criminal Law, Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2023Journal Article, 2023, DOI , URL , TARA - Full Text
• Kenneth Silver, Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance, by Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 232 pp., Review of Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance, Ken-Hou Lin and Megan Tobias Neely , Business Ethics Quarterly, 32, (1), 2022, p203-207Review, 2022
• Kenneth Silver, Corporate Weakness, Society for Business Ethics 2022 Annual Conference, 2022Oral Presentation, 2022
• Kenneth Silver, Must I Forgive? Elective Forgiveness and Self-Respect, Rocky Mountains Ethics Congress, 2022Poster, 2022
• Kenneth Silver, Backwards Causation in Social Institutions, Erkenntnis, 2022Journal Article, 2022, DOI , URL , TARA - Full Text
• Kenneth Silver, Paul Garofalo, Excusing Corporate Wrongdoing and the State of Nature, Academy of Management Review, 2024Journal Article, 2024, DOI , URL
• Kenneth Silver, Corporate Weakness of Will, Journal of Business Ethics, 2024Journal Article, 2024, DOI , TARA - Full Text

• Kenneth Silver, What's Immoral About Investing in Immoral Corporations?, Colloquium Series, FHWien der WKW, 03/2020, 2020Invited Talk
• Kenneth Silver, Corporate Mens Rea, Symposium on Alex Sarch's Criminally Ignorant: Why the Law Pretends We Know What We Don't, Trinity College Dublin, 2019Invited Talk
• Kenneth Silver, Determination from Above, Philosophical Issues, 33, (1), 2023, p237 - 251Journal Article, DOI , URL , TARA - Full Text

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.

Philosophy, Ethics and Religion, Economics and Business Administration, Social sciences,

• Teaching Excellence Award from Trinity Business School 2022
• Finalist for Best Conference Paper Award, Society for Business Ethics Annual Meeting 2018
• Worth Award - awarded annually to an undergraduate by the UNC Chapel Hill Philosophy Department for scholarship 2010
• Society for Business Ethics Founders' Award 2017
• Finalist for Best Conference Paper Award, Society for Business Ethics Annual Meeting 2022

• International Social Ontology Society current
• American Philosophical Association current
• Society for Business Ethics current
• Academy of Management current
• Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society current

• Society for Business Ethics representative for the American Philosophical Association