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Re: Corporations as persons
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I think using the word 'person' as a metaphor for corporations has interesting
consequences. It enables us to discuss corporations in a new vocabulary, a
vocabulary which is untainted by years of criticism and rhetoric. Using the
vocabulary of personhood allows us to analyse the personality of a corporation,
which would perhaps enable us to remove the 'bad apples'/psychpaths, while at
the same time allowing us to develop a model of a 'corporate benefactor' as a
role model. A corporate benefactor might be a corporation whose traits include:
sustainability; generation and distribution of wealth; scientific advance (e.g.
medical, environmental protection); and a commitment to providing education
rather than propaganda.
In addition, I have suggested that there are very real ways - which are
unconnected with the suggested vocubulary revision - in which the rise of
corporations leads to the limitation, distortion or removal of the status of
human beings as persons.
I agree with you that no corporation qualifies for moral agency, but the problem
is that corporations do have "moral rights and duties." The legal ability to
own property, borrow money etc are examples of the moral rights and duties of a
company. However, a corporation cannot be put in prison, so we have a situation
where law breaking companies simply get slapped with a fine. As a consequence,
where law breaking is judged to be more profitable than avoiding fines,
corporations have a tendency towards breaking the law.
Thanks,
Nick
Quoting Matthew Hodgetts <matthew.hodgetts@gmail.com>:
> Well, we can certainly use intentional vocabulary to describe corporations
> but I'm not sure if this proves anything. I use intentional words to talk
> about genes all the time (e.g. your genes want to increase their chances of
> appearing in the next generation), but all this is metaphor and is
> understood to be so. 'Person' is a tricky word, and we should probably give
> a stipulative definition if we want it to do any philosophical work, since
> whatever results we get from analysis of how the word is used in natural
> language will probably come up with a whole tangled web of diverse concepts.
> We are of course free to define 'person' however we want (although it will
> probably be useful if it approaches how we ordinarily use it). If you want
> to mean 'person' to be described of anything that can have intentional vocab
> applied to it, but we just need to be aware what 'a corporation is a person'
> means. Given the meaning of 'person' here, it would obviously wrong to
> conclude that a corporation was conscious or had any moral rights or duties:
> these things not seeming to follow from being able to be spoken about
> intentionally (where such intentional talk can be (and often is only
> supposed to be) metaphorical).
>
> Matthew
>
>
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