Should Corporations Have More Leeway to Kill Than People Do?

This is a common misconception, and probably at the root of the logical fallacy that has resulted in the absurdity of corporations being treated legally as conscious beings. In reality, decision-making and action can be so diffused in a large organization that no individual could possibly be held morally responsible for the resulting collective action. If you've ever been caught in a human stampede, you will understand the feeling of being part of something terribly destructive, and yet helpless to stop it. A corporation (and any other large social organization) is a complex adaptive system, truly a separate entity in its own right. But not an entity with anything resembling human intelligence, and certainly not an entity that can be deterred by legal sanctions any more than a mob can be deterred, short of sanctions that actually dissolve the entity. The best we can do is to deter piecemeal identifiable individual actions, but this does not come close to solving the problem of regulating corporate behavior, and in fact can obscure the problem by perpetuating the myth that for every corporate action there is a responsible human decisionmaker.