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Due to some oversight in my education, I had read various philosophical accounts of person hood before I was exposed to the seemingly absurd notion that corporations are persons. Of course, corporations are legally persons-they would generally fail to meet most philosophical definitions of person. Being a legal person is, as might be imagined, rather different from being a person in the philosophical sense. Philosophical accounts of what it is to be a person are generally subject to rather demanding criticisms based on intuitions, logic and so forth. In the case of legal persons, this seems to be largely a matter of getting a law or ruling that says that X is a legal person. There is, as far as I know, no requirement that such a law be well founded, well argued or even intuitively plausible. In theory, then, anything could be made into a legal person-subject to the whims of voters, lawyers or judges.
While I have argued elsewhere that corporations should not be considered persons, I am going to (at least for the sake of this short essay) reverse my usual view and instead say that the person hood of corporations should be embraced. They should be regarded as persons like any other person and accorded to full moral and legal status as persons (including rights, duties and obligations).
This would, on the face of it, entail that corporations should be treated just like any other person for tax purposes. After all, for me to fall under special tax laws because I am a Mohawk-French-English American would seem unfair to other Americans. Likewise, the fact that someone is a corporate-American (no doubt with multiple citizenships) should not thus entitle them to special treatment in this regard. As such, if a corporation really is a person, then they should fill out the standard tax forms and be entitled only to the standard deductions and so on. Alternatively, we should all receive the same tax (and other legal) rights as the corporation-Americans (or corporation-Australians or whatever). Given the benefits corporation receive, the rest of us would seem to be second class people in comparison. This seems to be wrong.
It might be replied that corporations, the legal people, are special and thus entitled to benefits that lesser “meaty people” are not entitled to. This would seem to be a rather hateful sort of discrimination against us meaties in favor of the legalies. Then again, it could be accepted that the corporation is merely a legal fiction that is perpetuated because of its benefits to certain people (someone would need to break the news to Mitt Romney, though).
This view would also seem to entail that corporations would need to be citizens and thus entitled to all the benefits and responsibilities. To deny corporation-Americans the right to vote would seem to be a gross violation of their person hood. They should also be obligated to serve on juries, to register for selective service (well, at least the male corporations), and they should be counted in the census. There is, of course, the obvious problem of how the corporation-person would actually engage in voting or serve on the jury. After all, unlike other persons, the corporation person seems to have no actual nexus of person hood that could be in a specific location. There is also the problem that the corporation-person cannot actually think, talk, or write-unless it is accepted that it takes possession of employees and speaks through them. If so, the corporation could thus send a possessed member to vote, to serve on the jury or to serve in the military if it is drafted in times of war. Or perhaps the whole entity is the corporation-a collective person. In that case, the whole thing would seem to be the person. This would make the jury room rather crowded, should a corporation get summoned for duty.
It might be replied that this is all rather silly. Corporations are not some sort of mind that can possess individuals (as the gods were said to possess the oracles at Delphi) nor are they a collective mind composed of the people that work for them and the things they own. After all corporations have no minds, no personalities, no feelings, no thoughts, no beliefs, no desires, no perceptions, no life and so on. There would seem to be, to steal a bit from Nagasena, no self in regards to corporations. This, one might suspect, would seem to entail that they cannot be people-after all, nothing cannot be a person. Then again, perhaps it is wisest to again take them to be mere legal fictions rather than people in any meaningful sense. This would, of course, include granting them constitutional rights on the basis of being actual people.
However, I am committed to trying to treat corporations as people. Perhaps they can be treated as people in terms of their moral status and moral obligations. Of course, if they are morally people, then this would seem to have some interesting implications for moral theories. Since corporations apparently cannot possess virtues, then virtue theory would be out as a moral theory. The same would also apply to many forms of utilitarianism. Since, for example, corporations do not feel pleasure or pain, they would not count morally, so these theories would need to be rejected. Kant’s theory would also be right out-his account of persons and the role they play in morality would be completely incompatible with the corporation-person. Of course, there is always the option of arguing that there are persons and there are corporation-people. They are both persons, but different sort of persons in fundamental ways. So different that one might suspect that corporations are not people.
I will be writing more about taking corporations to be people in the moral sense.
Corporations are not people. They are a shield of protection for people. In the words of British judge, J Walton, a corporation is “…only a juristic figment of the imagination, lacking both a body to be kicked and a soul to be damned.”
… the corporation person seems to have no actual nexus of person hood that could be in a specific location.
But corporations appoint officers to act for them, otherwise they would be unable to transact business; functioning as an officer implies that one attends to the policies of the corporation rather than one’s own concerns and morals. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why an officer couldn’t be sent to serve as a juror.
… corporations apparently cannot possess virtues …
We can think of “corporate culture” as analagous to personality; so why should a corporation not be as able as an individual to posses and act from virtue?
(We probably jump to the idea that “corporations” are business entities (with the Prime Directive to maximize monetary return to the shareholders) (hence the immediate leap to tax policy) but there can be other types of “corporate entities” such as affinity groups, religious denominations, moral improvement societies, educational institutions, military formations, etc etc etc, with various characteristics and purposes.)
I have gotten the impression from people currently dissatisfied with the state of the American union (or Corporatocracy if you will) want to overturn the rule set that allowed it to get to its current state in the first place.
I had an untested theory that outright opposition, even to lunacy would never succeed in the face of overwhelming force but the first attempts to make right the wrong would best be through channels using the very rules that allowed things to degrade to their current state.
In this sense turning right around and requiring corporations as people to adhere to all the laws that people are bound by in the mesh of social contracts makes perfect sense.
If you (you being the powers that now be) demand these special accomodations for your corporate “person” then so too must your corporate “person” be bound by the same laws all “people” are bound by, and thus be liable for criminal negligence for any number of profit driven locality destroying practices.
If the powers that now be violently opposed this rational demand based on their irration demand that corporate “people” be afforded the same free-speech protections granted all “people” then the cards would be on the table and we would have a better guide on the next steps to take as people who are fed up with the vulgar distortion of self-determination and personhood.
However, it’s a very hopeful sign that large swathes of opinion on both left and right are opposed to “corporatism”, which presupposes that corporations are individual “agents to be respected”. If practically everyone is opposed to that sort of thing, it will end.
Basically, being a legal person means being a right-bearer or right-holder.
Being a psychological person is an intrinsic natural property (of natural individuals), whereas being a legal person is an extrinsic cultural property (of natural individuals or social institutions/organizations).
What Kinds of Entities Can be Legal Right-holders?: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-rights/#3
Person hood of corporations is a rather peculiar facet of positive law. I was thinking about it while reading on some other topic on the ‘outskirts’ of person hood. Namely, animal ethics. To me it’s interesting, how it was accepted, that (some, probably influential or wealthy human) persons could virtually multiply their rights (often only these rights, but not the duties) by creating abstract legal persons, while on the other hand it was felt as insulting to ‘persons’ that animals might possess many features of what is defined as prerequisite to being a person.
Marshall,
We could, to be consistent, claim that all groups with an adequate level of organization are persons. After all, there would seem to be no relevant difference between corporations and such groups in this regard. However, this seems to point the way to a reductio on the claim that corporations are persons.
Alex,
Sadly, folks have an amazing and alarming capacity to embrace inconsistencies and even contradictions.
However, as you note, if corporations get the right to free speech because they are supposed to be people, then it would follow that all the other laws regarding persons would apply as well.
I just heard that the American Tea Party wants to enact a Constitutional Admendment to define marriage exclusively as a union between two consenting corporations. (sorry, couldn’t resist)
Maturana made some such suggestion, but legal persons had best belong to a denumerable set of discrete entities, or eg “voting” isn’t going to make much sense. I suppose that here we are talking about entities that are “legally incorporated”, having filed articles with some convening authority. I just mean to suggest that legal corporations can be organized morally organized according to various teleologies, documented in some “statement of purpose”.
Pragmatically, I suspect it would be impossibly difficult to create an actual political system that was blind to whether a person was an individual or a suitable corporate entity (should a corporation be able to marry a human??? *) which is more or less what you have set out to explore, and if not why not, isn’t it?
So I don’t understand why you think “corporations” can’t be virtuous: fit to be judged according to some standard of virtue. Attempting to live according to, or up to, such a standard. Why a virtue ethic couldn’t be made to apply. Even in the trivial case of the virtue of creating maximum financial return for investors, or some more interesting Aristotlean-like virtue, such as the ideals common to Oxford Colleges. Eh?
* “Idoru” by William Gibson
Some of the comments here illustrate the dangers of making moral judgements by appealing to basic “rights”.
For example, if you think that free speech should be allowed because we have a “right” to it, you are liable to think it should be limited because no one should have more than their “fair share of it”. One comment above suggests that corporations shouldn’t “have” it, because they don’t properly have a “right” to it.
In the UK, Kantian Onora O’Neill is riding a wave of anti-tabloid popular opinion and trying to limit press freedom by introducing laws that control the “process” rather than the “content” of newspapers. But this is just a dishonest, sneaky way of preventing the expression of unapproved opinions. (For example, right wing opinions are typically expressed by commercial corporations, religious opinions are typically expressed by the churches, which presumably count as corporations too, and so on.)
There are good utilitarian grounds for freedom of thought and expression that do not appeal to “rights” at all, and thus would not limit the expression of opinions that are not approved by the politically correct masses.
Randy,
Being persons, they could marry. We’d have to sort out which ones are male and which ones are female though. The Tea Party would not be for any same-sex corporate marriage. In some cases, the gender would be clear (Mary Kay, for example) but in other cases it would be less clear. I’m sure Congress will get right on this.
Marshall,
In regards to virtue theory, one problem is that there would seem to be be no entity that could support the virtues or vices apart from the individuals. When corporations act virtuously, this seems to be an action that would be analyzed completely in term of the specific human persons involved-that is, there would seem to be no extra agent (the corporation) that remains after the individual humans and their actions are taken out of the picture. To use a concrete example:
Sam, Sally, Sasha and Big Bert decide to donate Christmas presents to homeless kids because they believe it is the right thing to do. In this case, there are four people clearly involved.
Sam, Sally and Sasha, who work for Big Corp, decide, from the goodness in their hearts, to allocate some budget money to buying gifts for homeless people. Let us remove Sally, Sam and Sasha from the situation in terms of their actions and decision making. What then is left that Big Corp did? Nothing, it would seem. So, Big Corp is not a 4th person here.
But, one might say, they used Big Corp money! True, but Big Corp money was generated by the actions of the individual workers, etc. Take away all of them, and there is nothing that Big Corp added (well, other than the tax breaks and so on that corporations get).
But, it might be contended, if you take away all your cells, then there is no you! So, a corporation is a collective person that is made up of the human people-they are corporate cells.
While this is an interesting avenue, the connection between the people who make up corporations does not seem to be such that it would intuitively create a person in a way analogous to how the components of a human person form a human person (laying aside that a person might be a soul or metaphysical mind-in which case corporations would clearly not be people-unless signing legal documents has the power to create a soul/mind).
Jeremy,
That is a point worth considering. I’d be inclined to think that the right to free speech should not be considered the sort of right that should be limited based on the fair share notion. In the case of corporations, I do not think that they get more than their fair share of free speech. Rather, the concern is that they are not an extra person over and above the people that make them up. To use an analogy to voting, it is not that I would think that a corporation would get more than its fair share if it could vote. Rather, it is that I think that a corporation is not a citizen that has the right to vote.
This could, I suppose, be cast as being a “more than a fair share” situation. To use an analogy, suppose that a race gives a medal to each finisher. Each person who finishes is thus entitled to a medal. Now, if Sam, Sally and Sasha form RunnerCorp and then grab a fourth medal for RunnerCorp, this might be seen as a way of getting more than their fair share (it would seem to be 3 people getting medals for 4 people).
Hi Mike,
I don’t think free speech should be conceived as any sort of “entitlement” that a speaker can “own” at all, partly because we conceive of too many abstractions as “things to be owned”, and partly because free speech isn’t “good for the speaker” so much as “good for the hearers”.
As Mill argued, freedom of thought and expression is a sort of oxygen in which new ideas grow, and old ideas stay alive rather than turning into “dead dogma”. It promotes ideas, truth and knowledge.
For example, it seems to me to be absolutely vital that knowledge of the Holocaust be kept alive. But that knowledge is partly kept alive by groups representing victims, and by the occasional Holocaust-denier, among others. In a few years’ time all actual victims will be dead, so that only corporation-type groups will represent them.
If we think of free speech as an “entitlement”, we will have to say that what’s right about letting the denier have his say is that “he deserves it” as a speaker, and and possibly that the corporation-type group “doesn’t deserve it” as a corporation. (And some would want to deny that the speaker “deserves it” since he’s probably some sort of fascist.) In my view, those are terrible ideas. Instead, we should realise that ideas, truth and knowledge are promoted by the oxygen of free speech. If anyone “deserves” anything, it is we hearers of what opposing sides have to say who are obliged to consider the claims, so that we may know more.
This is all part of my own hostility to the idea of abstract rights, of course, which I share with Burke and Bentham.
I’m not sure why it should be assumed that all legal persons should have the same legal rights. E.g. a 17-y.o. human being in the jurisdiction is a legal person, but does not have the right to vote. She may have the right to marry, but she probably didn’t when she was 13.
Legal personhood may bring certain rights, obligations, and so on, but the main point is being an entity that can be a plaintiff or defendant in court, where rights are fought over.
Just what legal rights we assign certain kinds of legal persons is going to depend on various policy considerations. The specific rights given to corporations are based on certain economic considerations (there is supposed to be some economic benefit, accruing to society as a whole, in allowing people who unite for trade and commerce to be able to limit their liability) and convenience. It doesn’t follow that corporations should be given, say, the right to vote or to marry, or that they need the same kind of protection from defamation as actual people.
One policy consideration might be whether someone or something is actually a person in the Lockean sense – capable of self-consciousess, etc. Such a being can be harmed in ways that a tree, say, can’t be. Even if we have the fiction that certain trees are legal persons, allowing someone to sue in their name in the courts, we won’t, say, allow them to sue for defamation.
But other considerations might even relate to things like intellectual competence – children are not denied the right to vote because they are not considered persons (though very young children are probably not persons in the philosophical sense), but presumably because they are considered not to have yet developed sufficient competence to make informed and reasoned political decisions.
Compare the decisions we let children make about more personal matters. Until they can demonstrate some sort of competence, we don’t allow them off their own bat to refuse medical treatment. Until they reach a certain age we don’t allow them to consent to have sex. Until a certain age, they cannot be served alcohol. Until a certain age, they can’t marry, can’t work for pay except in special circumstances, must attend school .. and so on.
This isn’t because they are not persons, but because we develop policies based on the different needs, capacities, vulnerabilities, and so on, of (among other things) different categories of persons.
What was unbeknownst to the people at the time when the corporation was being made into an artificial individual was that it was done so that governments would have an equal adversary and a counterweight to its powers. Mortal individuals were not enough to counterbalance the increasing powers of government, hence the establishing of the corporation as an artificial individual, equal under the law. It is a perverse way of containing government but a way.
For instance, if Egypt had cultivated the corporation as such, with its networking and feedback systems, the political and social turmoil that exists there today would not be. Under such a system the general public would have more say and a greater stake in the over all system of governnce.
I think of freedom of speech as a negative right (non-entitlement) in that it entails that (in general) one should not be prevented from speaking (or whatever). An entitlement would seem to mean that a person has a right to the means of speech (that is, for example, that I should be provided with TV time or newspaper space to express myself).
I’m fine with rights, mainly because the seem to be a useful moral bulwark against utilitarians.
True, the legal rights of a person can vary by age and mental capacities. As such, corporations could be assigned specific rights as special sorts of people. Of course, there is also the idea that when an entity is a person, it gets all the person rights automatically except those that are specifically excluded (such as by age). So, for example, a 21 year old corporation would seem to have the right to drink, unless there are laws that cover corporations and alcohol consumption. We might also need to consider laws governing age and selling-so, for example, a corporation that is too young might be acting illegally by selling certain products (such as alcohol or pornography-since it would not be legally old enough to possess such items).
Mike wrote:
“freedom of speech as a negative right (non-entitlement)” [...] entails that (in general) one should not be prevented from speaking (or whatever).”
But might a corporation be prevented from speaking on the grounds that it did not have such a right?
That’s what I’d be worried about — an issue of freedom getting treated as a matter of “distributive justice”.
“I’m fine with rights, mainly because the seem to be a useful moral bulwark against utilitarians.
”
Ha ha, however I’d argue that the fundamental appeal of rights is that they seem to respect autonomy and individual preferences — exactly what preference utilitarianism does minus the “fifth wheel” of a quasi-legalism.
I’m sure you’ll come round eventually, my son!
The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes satirized personification or anthropomorphism. Many people still take issue with personification of God, corporations, or zygotes. Is there an immediate pragmatic reason for personifying a corporation other than for the purpose of entertainment and literary device? That is more generally, is it easier to treat anything like a person? Certainly, some of us have found humour and relaxation in the comic strips when reading a talking dog. The personification of corporations is like the introduction to a new computer game, where the android corporation can have some of the attributes of a person.
A corporation functions with a deliberate mix of corporate law and decisions from shareholders and directors. I am not sure what the “moral sense” of corporations means. Does this mean the procedural methods of how a corporation ought to function, or to address a specific incident (eg. environmental pollution) perpetrated by a corporation?
The actual people who do the talking “for” the corporation have their full rights in place, so they can speak away as they wish. Presumably they cannot be stripped of the freedom of expression when they are speaking in their capacity as corporate whatever.
I stick with rights for the same reason I stick with tropes and dualism-battles against overwhelming odds are glorious.
Mike wrote:
‘The actual people who do the talking “for” the corporation have their full rights in place, so they can speak away as they wish.’
What if the talking is done via a newspaper editorial or in the media? It’s true that the individuals involved can still claim their individual “right” to express their opinion, but if they cannot express them through the organ of the newspaper editorial or TV, their voice is greatly diminished if not quite “silenced”.
Something rather like this has actually been happening in the UK, where there is no written constitution and therefore no First Amendment. For example, an unpopular government minister was prevented from speaking recently at a well-known university. He was simply shouted down by a student mob until he gave up. These students would probably claim that they had not interfered with his individual “right” to free speech, since he can talk privately to anyone who cares to listen. They only prevented a government representative getting “too much airtime” – “airtime” presumably being something that has to be meted out fairly between competing corporations so that no opinion gets “unfair coverage”. Censorship.
For another example, there is currently a lot of public anger in the UK aimed at the “tabloid” press. There are calls for more “regulation” of the press. I fear a Kant-and-Rawls-influenced philosopher of “rights” called Onora O’Neill (a member of the House of Lords and thus a politician) is arguing that while the government should not control press content, it should control “process”, whatever that might be. I smell a rat here, because I suspect this is an insidious way of controlling content. For example, suppose climate change scepticism is connected with “big oil”, and a government watchdog body rules that it is an unacceptable “process” for “big oil” to get “too much of a say”. This would again amount to censorship of an unwelcome opinion.
Mike: “… no entity that could support …”
This point applies to any virtue theory, indeed any moral theory does it not? As, Mackie’s “queer objects.” Where are “rights” when the enabling legislation is removed? Where are persons’ feelings and desires when merely mechanical neuronic activity is removed? I think that was Searle’s point in the “Chinese Room” argument that was aimed at AI but would seem to apply in the contemporary “free will” conversation as well; he proved that it is impossible to have an actual conversation in Chinese. I say, something is wrong here, or at least off the point. The conversations that Chinese people have are capable of interest.
“… no extra agent that remains ….”
In the case of corporations, what remains are the articles of incorporation, supported by formal policies and prodeedures. There would be an explicit statement of the purpose for which the corporation has been formed (perhaps abbreviated as “to do business” or some such, which amounts to an inclusion by reference of a lot of well-developed theory). I think this is an explicit (local) definition of virtue.
Another way of saying that there is no remaining agent is that agency resides entirely in the role, not in the human individual. The humans are entirely replaceable.
Officers, government officials, lawyers, all must be proficient at keeping their personal opinions out of their professional activity such that one would do as well as another; it is not at all true that they can at any time “speak as they wish”.
Sam et all have exposed Big Corp to a shareholder suit and/or criminal liability by diverting money unless they weasel around it by talking about PR or some such. It is difficult for corporations to act in socially responsible ways (eg by not externalizing costs of water pollution or employee health) precisely because such actions would violate the virtue of maximizing shareholder equity. On the other hand, if they worked for Feed the Homeless, a non-profit corporation that operates soup kitchens under a different virtue-statement, they would be remiss if they did otherwise.
“… does not seem to be such that it would intuitively create a person …”
You have an emotivist theory of morality? But as public policy it would seem we need a common basis for common activity. Anyway the cat is out of the bag, since already corporations are acknowledged as persons in some sense.
.
Russell: I think the point is that in a democracy all persons shall be presumed equal, over the entire class of persons. There are acknowledged reasons why equality shall not apply in various cases, but particular exceptions must be particularly justified.
We could say that the presumption of equality is a constitutive virtue of democracy, from which rights to free speech, due process, etc are derived; or we could say that democracy is constituted by rights which collectively define the virtue. Can we distinguish the two cases? (I think not but that the former is cleaner, ie simpler notation and more suited to flexible extension.)
Marshall,
>In the case of corporations, what remains are the articles of incorporation, supported by formal policies and prodeedures. There would be an explicit statement of the purpose for which the corporation has been formed (perhaps abbreviated as “to do business” or some such, which amounts to an inclusion by reference of a lot of well-developed theory). I think this is an explicit (local) definition of virtue.<
These articles would not seem to constitute a person in anything but a purely legal sense. Unless, which might be interesting, they could be seen as comparable to the data needed to reconstruct a person in a sci-fi scenario.
Another way of saying that there is no remaining agent is that agency resides entirely in the role, not in the human individual. The humans are entirely replaceable.<
But the role can do nothing-that would seem to be a bit like saying that the agency rests in the driver’s seat. But there is no agency without a driver. In any case, the role does not seem to be a person.
Officers, government officials, lawyers, all must be proficient at keeping their personal opinions out of their professional activity such that one would do as well as another; it is not at all true that they can at any time “speak as they wish”.Sam et all have exposed Big Corp to a shareholder suit and/or criminal liability by diverting money unless they weasel around it by talking about PR or some such. It is difficult for corporations to act in socially responsible ways (eg by not externalizing costs of water pollution or employee health) precisely because such actions would violate the virtue of maximizing shareholder equity. On the other hand, if they worked for Feed the Homeless, a non-profit corporation that operates soup kitchens under a different virtue-statement, they would be remiss if they did otherwise.<
I’m not sure if maximizing shareholder equity is a virtue.
“… does not seem to be such that it would intuitively create a person …”
You have an emotivist theory of morality? But as public policy it would seem we need a common basis for common activity. Anyway the cat is out of the bag, since already corporations are acknowledged as persons in some sense.<
Not at all. I’m a virtue theorist on even days and flip a coin between utilitarianism and Kantianism on odd days.
The cat is, as you say, out of the bag. But whether that dog will hunt is another matter entirely.
Jeremy,
I would say that the students did interfere with his freedom of speech by actively preventing him from being heard. Assuming that they had no legitimate grounds for this, they have acted wrongly.
As far as getting too much air time, that is an interesting point. While there are venues in which time is limited for fairness (debates) or practical reasons (like in a class which has a set end), I would like to see what sort of case can be made for censoring people for getting too much free speech.
As far as the tabloid press, I think one obvious concern is the phone hacking. Preventing the press from hacking into people’s voice-mail does not seem to impair the right of journalists to free speech.
“These articles would not seem to constitute a person in anything but a purely legal sense. Unless, which might be interesting, they could be seen as comparable to the data needed to reconstruct a person in a sci-fi scenario.”
That gets at what I mean, admitting I didn’t say it very well above. The corporation can continue “the same” if all the humans are replaced. Theoretically; always much essential knowledge is not written, exists only in human brains. However, consider the management maxims to the effect “If your organization has indispensable employees, that’s a problem you should work on.”
Of course a corporation needs humans performing the various roles; but the corporation’s agency is in the role, not in the individuals. Contracts are signed by an officer acting for the corporation, not by the officeholder acting for himself. That’s the point of a corporation (vis a vis a proprietorship or partnership).
“…the role does not seem to be a person.”
Exactly so, the corporation is the quasi-person. The role, instantiated in some human, is in the relationship of a cell to an organism. It has a life of its own that is somewhat irrelevant to the life of the organism. It’s the tree, not the forest.
“I’m not sure if maximizing shareholder equity is a virtue.”
It isn’t one of the Cardinal Virtues, to be sure! But besides “The Virtues”, ‘virtue’ is the name of a category of moral principle. Stanford/Plato says “The most significant aspect of [the mindset associated with a particular virtue, such as honesty] is the wholehearted acceptance of a certain range of considerations as reasons for action.” It seems to me that MSE stands to corporations as Citizenship stands to Aristotelean man; the problem is that MSE is too much of a Heroic virtue, unsuited to the life of the global polis. We would like to do better, but unfortunately as things are organizations arranged otherwise are generally only marginally survivable.
“The cat is, as you say, out of the bag. But whether that dog will hunt is another matter entirely.”
I’m not really arguing about that issue, although I think the existence moral entities of a scale between the individual and the aggregate is necessary for the social progress we would all like to see; the destruction of such entities in the past few centuries is our central problem. IMO.
My point: you said: “Since corporations apparently cannot possess virtues, then virtue theory would be out as a moral theory.” I don’t see that that’s true at all.
Marshall,
The idea that people can speak for the corporation in a literal sense reminds me of the discussion between Socrates and Ion. Socrates claims that poets are possessed when they do their thing and it is the gods speaking through them. So, do the corporations possess the people who speak for them? In other words, given that people would seem to require intentional states, where do such states reside for the corporation?
Mike wrote:
“I would say that the students did interfere with his freedom of speech by actively preventing him from being heard.”
So is my freedom of speech (or “right” to freedom of speech) interfered with because the New York Times didn’t publish my letter? Or because I’m not as famous as you?
I think not: let is think of free speech as the oxygen of a free society rather than any sort of “property” such as “right” or “entitlement”.
I completely agree with the idea that corporations (families, societies, “communities”, whatever) only matter inasmuch as the individuals involved fare well or badly. I am 100% individualist (old-fashioned word: ‘liberal’). I just think the idea of abstract “rights” undermines it.
In the case of the NYT, no-the freedom of speech is a negative right (or so I believe) in that it protects you from non-legitimate interference. It is not a positive right, which is to say that no one is obligated to provide you with the means of speech (such as publishing your letter or running your video for free on TV).
The point about fame is interesting-do the famous have an unfair advantage in this regard and should anything be done about it?
Where would you say intentional states reside in humans???
Personally, I follow Richard Rorty in asserting that human mental states are abstractions intended to be helpful in describing relations with the larger world. And corporations certainly do perform actions arising from their relations with the world. They act on their own behalf to make a profit, reduce risk to themselves, grow, be well thought of, and generally fulfill (as best they can) a notion of eudaimonia such as taught to MBAs.
But if you don’t agree, we will have to take a look at whatever you think intentional states are. “A disposition to act in a certain way” we already talked about. Concerning “a decision to take a particular action”, the process is rather more explicit for a corporation than for a human: the Board of Directors takes a vote, or delegates to the CEO, who decides or delegates to his managers, or something similar. … Or?
(I expect you might object that a corporation isn’t conscious in the way a human is; more or less Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument. But I don’t see that consciousness in that sense is required; ex hypothesi, the Chinese Room passes the Chinese Turing Test.)
Socrates speaks: “Had [the rhapsode] learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.”
The image of possession seems apropos … “through them it is conversing with us” … but (eg) a lawyer acting on behalf of a corporation did learn by rules of art and need speak of one theme only. And hopefully not while unconscious. The corporation takes away the lawyer’s conscience, but makes full use of his rational faculties.
Where would you say intentional states reside in humans???<
I’m a Cartesian, so I would say they reside in the immaterial substance that composes the mind. But, I am willing to consider that we are meat-bots and that intentional states are functional states of the bio-chemical system of the body. Perhaps a corporation could be seen as a set of functional states that we call a person. Of course, we could do the same for ant hills, trees, pods of whales, krill, squirrel nests, forests, planets and perhaps the entire universe (pan-personism).
Personally, I follow Richard Rorty in asserting that human mental states are abstractions intended to be helpful in describing relations with the larger world. And corporations certainly do perform actions arising from their relations with the world. They act on their own behalf to make a profit, reduce risk to themselves, grow, be well thought of, and generally fulfill (as best they can) a notion of eudaimonia such as taught to MBAs.<
I’m an old school metaphysician, so I think that my mental states are not just abstractions, etc. I think they are states of my quivering ectoplasm.
I think they’re the very opposite of “abstractions” — more like “concretizations”.
Think of any of the other things we call “abstractions”, and compare and contrast their relative particularity, observability, theoreticalness, etc.
@Jeremy: I don’t object; what I meant is that “mental states” are a result of analysis, not epistemic “things in themselves”. Made into standalone nouns (“concretized”) for purposes of further analysis. Like “substitution of variables” in basic math. But what you said a week ago, “we conceive of too many abstractions as ‘things to be owned’”: calling them ‘concretizations’ would seem to make that error easier.
@Mike: A Cartesian. Well. I do tend to agree that corporations don’t have any ectoplasm hanging about them. Although you could hope that they might evolve some over the coming millennia, as an analog to my hope that they can/will develop a better (post-Heroic) concept of eudaimonia for themselves.
“…of course we could do the same for…”
I pointed earlier to Maturana, who said we should call an “organism” whatever exhibits “self-organizing behavior”, that is it maintains itself by active (internally initiated) exchanges with the outer world. A quality for which he coined the term “autopoiesis”. Such organisms can overlap, as proteins are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into plants and animals, which are organized into ecosystems. And of course humans organized into Corporations. We can talk meaningfully at any of these levels and shift coherently from one level to another.
Even a rock possesses “functional states”, but it isn’t autopoietic. Neither are squirrel nests, or planets. I do claim that corporations in general can be regarded as “organisms” in Maturana’s sense. Clearly not all organisms are entitled to be regarded as “persons”, but we haven’t gone very far towards deciding what it means to be a person. Personally, I think in the current environment the term is too sloppy to be useful. Time to mosey over to the other thread?
Jeremy,
That is a good point. On one hand, they are very concrete-after all, corporations manifest themselves in products, logos, structures, financial instruments, and so on. On the other hand, they also seem to be abstract entities in that they are legal fictions that exist only in the minds of persons.
Or perhaps there are Platonic forms of corporations? That would actually make a pretty good cartoon-a drawing of the Platonic soul communing with the forms and seeing all the corporate logos floating about in Plato-Space (what I jokingly call the Platonic Heaven).
Perhaps because of too much exposure to science fiction collective entities/minds, I am not inclined to see a corporation as an organism. Unless, of course, we want to take every organized collection of living creatures (a pod of whales, a group of D&D players, a married couple, a flock of seagulls, etc.) to be itself an organism over and above the individuals that make up said organization.
I regard corporations, rather, as being much like the religions of old that had organized temples and priesthoods. The priests claimed to be speaking for a real entity, but it was all a mere fiction. An often dangerous and profitable sort of fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.
It was bound to come around to the Evils of Religion eventually.