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Comment by forevergreenyon | Hacker News Reader

> Whether the corporation should be considered a person

My opinion is that "of course" they are; but that this also poses a challenge to our pre-corporate notion (conceptualization) of personhood.

My chosen way to make sense of this is that corporations are a person of a type person that exists above the layer (or 'strata') in which typical individual humans are persons. I say 'above' because human individuals are one of the main 'ingredients' that come together to form corporate persons.

the picture is how there are 'personhoods' of (at least) two distinct layers or strata: individual and collective persons. So the human individuals come together to form corporate individuals, a sort of meta-person.

And I mean this very much in the sense of an egregore; the main difference being how earlier large bureaucracies would use papers and letters and such, but corporate bureaucracies are now fully digitized and using computers in networks.

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What is the use of such a definition that needs to be qualified so much?

Its not a philosophical question, you don't need to decide it. Its just legal argument people came up with to try and give companies broad liberties to make more money. The article posted is about people's perceptions, of which it seems you are an outlier :).

I'm not sure 'meta-person' makes much sense. 'Meta-data' is data about data, but what's a meta-person? A person composed of other people? Would such a person-made-of-people have free will, or would its actions be constrained by majority groupthink outcomes?

In the case of today's corporations, it's just the executive board (selected by the shareholders) that makes the decisions, with no input from the employees except in places like Germany where labor unions often have board seats. Meta-executive, perhaps?

Interestingly, if corporations are people, do states in the USA with the death penalty have the right to dissolve corporations that commit murder? How would a corporation be incarcerated for a crime like bank robbery, what would a prison for corporations look like?

It's hard to conclude that corporate personhood is just a convenient legal fiction whose true intent is to expand the liability protection for shareholders and protect internal corporate documents from legal discovery and so on.

By this logic, any group of people cooperating to do anything is also a person. That is utterly nonsensical - what is the point of defining a group of people as a person?

yes, I admit that I've been trying to think about social interactions through this lens too.

but there's a difference between any random group and a corporation. The idea being that writing so many things down, and maybe more importantly, putting money into the 'group' (and all the associated formalities) makes this transient person formed into something more permanent, something that can change out the people involved and make the corporation outlive its creators (which most corporations do normally).

That definition could also apply to nations, religious groups, sports teams, and many other types of organization, completely redefining the term “person”. What would be the purpose?

You're staring down a rabbit hole. If want answers to some of these questions, enjoy:

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

Note: there are no real answers here, of course. I think the "purpose" though would be a less myopic view of what a person is. Notably, that there's no reason "person" and "homo sapien" should be synonymous. Once you admit that, then things start to get really fuzzy and we need a framework to get back to something that makes sense.

Until we gain a proper understanding and definition of consciousness, the matter is almost purely linguistic. Redefining the term “person” could happen if there’s a critical mass for it, but I think it’s unlikely because it would almost certainly serve to confuse, rather than inform, at least in everyday communication.

I haven’t looked deeply into the linked paper yet (although it does look interesting), but I’ve given the philosophical matter some amount of thought before.

I can only be (fairly) certain of the existence of my own consciousness. There’s no reason to think I’m special in regards to other people, so it’s safe to assume they have it as well. Animals seem to exhibit similar behaviors, and since we have a shared evolutionary background, I’d include many animal species, too.

Can’t say much for anything beyond that, regardless of how convincing, say, an AI’s words might sound. A photorealistic painting might also fool me, but I still wouldn’t attribute personhood to it afterwards.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man” did slightly change my mind on this matter, though. If we ever construct an artificial intelligence sufficiently similar to a human, it might be wise to err on the side of caution with respect to ethical treatment.

When the are engaged in any activity and need to limit liability.

Let's make an example: a group of people want to play football and have to rent a field. If they know each other very well, they could pool money and entrust one of them to rent the field. Activities like this are very common, but usually one-off and easily "audited" by the others.

If this activity is on a recurring basis though, or if there are new people joining, this way of doing things quickly becomes very awkward. What recourse have the group members if that person doesn't act on their task, or makes a deal with the owner of the field and pockets the difference, or uses the cash to bridge over cashflow holes in their personal finances? Or if they simply become incommunicado, or even die? The problems become even more severe when activities like festivals are organized, where the organizer would have to assume additional responsibilites. These problems would discourage any nontrivial economic activity.

Similar arguments can be made for other economic activities where unlimited and exclusive personal responsibility would be awkward. It's probably possible to regulate many aspects of such activities using contracts. But by doing that, something very similar to a corporation would be created. Of course, these days nobody does it this way. Most countries have very well developed laws that simplify these affairs.

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