Why It’s Essential to Treat Corporations as Persons, Except When It’s Not

a post by Chris MacDonald for The Business Ethics Blog

I’ve long held that you can’t understand much about business ethics if you don’t understand a bit about markets (their role and limits), corporations (their nature and purpose), and managers (their role and the limits on it). Of those three, it is perhaps the corporation that raises the most controversy, although the other two certainly generate their share.

A corporation is, very roughly, an entity recognised by the law and that exists independently of the people who form it. The general term “corporation” includes business corporations (Walmart, Amazon, etc.), as well as cooperatives (such as ACE Hardware and Dairy Farmers of America) and nonprofit corporations (including charities, universities, hospitals, etc.). Some churches are corporations too.

Corporations are treated as persons under the law just about everywhere. The notion has raised controversy in the US, especially in the wake of the 2010 Citizens United* decision of the US Supreme Court. But that controversy sometimes leads people to miss the fact that corporate personhood isn’t some idiosyncratic American thing. Corporations are treated as persons pretty much everywhere. (If you know an exception, let me know in the Comments section below). Take Canada’s criminal code, for example. The Criminal Code is full of sentences that say “every one who” or “every person who” does such-and-such is guilty of a crime. In the Definitions section of the Code, it clarifies that those terms (“every one” and “person”) are to be read as including organisations, and that “organisation” means “a public body, body corporate, society, company, firm, partnership, trade union or municipality” (and certain kinds of associations).

Continue reading noting that the examples are from North America. I have read it carefully and can find, from my limited knowledge of corporate law, nothing that cannot be applied in the UK.

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Artificial Intelligence: What’s to Fear?

posted by S. Abbas Raza in 3 Quarks Daily

Ronald W. Dworkin in The American Interest:

What should worry us most about artificial intelligence: losing our jobs to cheaper labor or losing our lives to killer robots? The real threat may lie in yet another danger: losing our minds.

In 2017, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University shocked the gaming world when they programmed a computer to beat experts in a poker game called no-limit hold ’em. People assumed a poker player’s intuition and creative thinking would give him or her the competitive edge. Yet by playing 24 trillion hands of poker every second for two months, the computer “taught” itself an unbeatable strategy.

Many people fear such events. It’s not just the potential job losses. If artificial intelligence (AI) can do everything better than a human being can, then human endeavor is pointless and human beings are valueless.

Computers long ago surpassed humans in certain skills—for example, in the ability to calculate and catalog. Yet they have traditionally been unable to reproduce people’s creative, imaginative, emotional, and intuitive skills. It is why personalized service workers such as coaches and physicians enjoy some of the sweetest sinecures in the economy. Their humanity, meaning their ability to individualize services and connect with others, which computers lack, adds value. Yet not only does AI win at cards now, it also creates art, writes poetry, and performs psychotherapy. Even lovemaking is at risk, as artificially intelligent robots stand poised to enter the market and provide sexual services and romantic intimacy.

More here.

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