Kendy Hess

Biography

Kendy is the Brake Smith Associate Professor of Ethics and Social Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross. 

Kendy holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Colorado, a MA from Northwestern University, and a JD from Harvard Law School.  Before taking her PhD, she had 15-year career as a corporate environmental lawyer, first as a partner at Altheimer & Gray and later as of counsel at Greenberg Traurig.

Kendy’s scholarship focuses on competing conceptions of the firm, and of the institution of business as a whole.  She is particularly interested in the normative implications of these different conceptions, both ethical and political.  Her work in this area yields a distinctive, liberal-arts based approach to business ethics pedagogy which was recently recognized by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Kendy engages with a variety of people and organisations to address issues regarding the moral and political obligations of firms, especially as they relate to the environment.  She travels widely to attend and speak at conferences and seminars in her field,  referees papers for numerous academic journals, and leads workshops based on her liberal arts approach to business pedagogy.  She spent 2024-25 as a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford Saïd Business School (Oxford), where she had primary responsibility for teaching ethics across programs in finance, law, and business.

Kendy is currently serving as the treasurer for the Society for Business Ethics, where she has been a member since 2014, and as the Vice Chair of the Board for the Native Plant Trust, where she has taken primary responsibility for initiatives around Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access.  

Clubs & Organizations

• https://www.holycross.edu/academics/programs/ethics-society-and-the-institution-of-business  
• https://www.nativeplanttrust.org/
• https://sbeonline.org/
• https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/ 

News, Research, & Publications

• “Corporate Moral Responsibility v. Corporate Social Responsibility: Friedman was Right.” Journal of Business Ethics (forthcoming)
• “Governing the Corpopolis: The Modern Firm as a Political Community” in Bill Wringe and Säde Hormio (eds), Collective Responsibility: Perspectives on Political Philosophy from Social Ontology, ___________  __ -_, 2025.
• “Re-Bunking Corporate Agency,” Inquiry ___. 2023.
• “To Serve and Inspect: The Tragedy of Employee Well-being in the Age of Foucault’s Discipline,” Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy 19: 764-85. 2022.