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Thought provoking. Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized. The thing with temples stems ultimately from fairly practical matters if they hold such treasure, but it's a magnet for strife, and actually kind of surprising that in the case-study mentioned they resisted the opportunity to justify abuse of power. What is a lawyer really but a kind of priest or magician, changing material reality with obscure incantations of dubious origin?

Historically and practically speaking, I get the impression that the boat stuff seems the least controversial and makes the most sense. Incoherent to want to sue a river for flooding, but if a boat crashes into your house for example, then you'd like to be able to at least seize the boat without enduring the back-and-forth deflection between owners and operators.

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> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

Only if/because they are reading too much into the concept of legal personhood. A thing being a person doesn't mean the thing is equivalent to a human or that it has every right that every human has. It generally just means that the law attributes certain rights and obligations to that thing because that is more convenient than finding the right human(s) to attribute them to in the circumstances.

Its just not logical to argue, either they are or they arent.

For instance, corporations can be bought or sold, but people cannot per the 13th amendment.

Help me understand how these inconsistent principles are allowed in the supposedly rigorous logic of the legal system

"Person" in legalese means something specific. It's not the same as the dictionary definition.

The proper reference isn't the dictionary. US socialization stems largely from the US Constitution. Within that framework, Person has a different meaning from the dictionary or most of the US legal frameworks. From that perspective, the objection to Person being ascribed to non-persons is obvious and warranted.

I would like to see the law defining that!

The US Supreme Court decided in 1886 [1] that it's the 14th amendment.

The general article on Wikipedia [2] has more info about it, and discusses the fact that corporate personhood is an abstraction that represents the rights of the individuals owning or running the company. "Statutes violating their prohibitions in dealing with corporations must necessarily infringe upon the rights of natural persons" and modern cases. That article also discusses how, from the 1920s to the 80s, general corporate personhood wasn't as broad as it is today. It also mentions, at the top, historical instances of the idea.

But to your point, no corporation in the US has full, equal rights to a natural person. It's an abstraction that the legal system does not apply blindly. You could change the phrase "corporate person" to something like "corporate legal entity with a set of rights that overlaps with natural persons" or demand a different approach to the rights of a corporation, but I don't think "you're using that word wrong" will hold much weight with legal professionals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_Un...

Title 1 Chapter 1 Section 1 of the US Code begins:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise—

words importing the singular include and apply to several persons, parties, or things;

words importing the plural include the singular;

words importing the masculine gender include the feminine as well;

words used in the present tense include the future as well as the present;

the words “insane” and “insane person” shall include every idiot, insane person, and person non compos mentis;

the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;

It's not even "a thing being a person", this is just dumbing down the situation. A boat is not a person. A boat is not a person "legally speaking", either. A boat has some of the same rights that people have.

For those unfamiliar, personhood status for environmental protection is real (beyond what the original blog mentioned)

NYTimes: In Move to Protect Whales, Polynesian Indigenous Groups Give Them ‘Personhood’ https://archive.is/H5fq8

Nat Geo: This Canadian river is now legally a person. It’s not the only one. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/these-rive...

I wonder how our mental model of nature will evolve over the next decades. For example, in the early 1900's, the United States had more laws protecting animals from overwork than it did for children. That feels unfathomable in today's United States, where animals are treated more as property than people. Perhaps something similar will happen, where we will understand everything as a "legal entity" that has protections.

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

Why do you think this would be the case? I agree with the former but not the latter.

Well I think one can justify it emotionally or logically. People identifying as anti-corporate are probably more likely to align as pro-environment. The emotional POV would be that non-person-personhood isn't good or bad intrinsically, it just depends if we approve of the area where the doctrine's applied.

The more logical reason is that if corporate personhood sucks and we have it anyway, then like it or not, now we need to extend it elsewhere just to level the playing field. If anti-environmental interests can hide behind it as a justification that makes their fight easier, then let the environmental interests do the same thing.

I want personhood for rivers because the rivers near me are being irreparably abused, and anything that can give them greater legal protection is welcome,

Juridical personhood doesn't benefit the entity to whom it is ascribed (directly, at least, and it may not even be a coherent concept for the kinds of things given juridical personhood), it most directly benefits the natural persons given the power to exercise the rights of personhood on its behalf, and sometimes benefits (by means of simplifying their task) the people seeking to use legal process against it.

I wouldn’t have so much problem with corporate personhood if we hadn’t decided money was speech.

Plus, if corporations get to be people for all the good stuff, it should require taking the bad bits too. E.g. capital punishment should be on the table.

> capital punishment should be on the table.

Isn't it, though? If a corporation was found guilty of murder I wouldn't be surprised for a court to order it dissolved.

Arthur Anderson, The accounting firm, got the death penalty in the Enron debacle.

You can dream up rules. But what environment would ever lead to this being enacted? Politicians don't seek virtue and fairness. You must address why such a rule has not been moved forward, and in fact why we have gone in the opposite direction. What would effectively motivate adopting your rule?

This 1000x

Why isn't money speech? Like I don't like that money influences politics, but ignoring corporations completely... can anyone explain why some person should not be able to spend their money to make their point? It all boils down to you being upset that you cannot use your means to make your point, rather than any fundamental ethical argument.

Because it means that someone with more money has a Constitutional right to be louder than those with less money.

Nonsense. The constitution holds that both individuals have an equal right to acquire the same money. People value different things. The constitution does not demand that people have an equal platform. This is like a preacher complaining that his freedom of religion isn't being respected because his congregation isn't large enough. Grow up

This is an absolutely insane take. By your comment, everyone who has a net worth of less than a billion dollars should just sit down, shut up, and let the rich people talk.

We should all have the equal right and ability to have our voice heard ESPECIALLY when it comes to political speech. Allowing billionaires and massive corporations the right to use their wealth to drown out the voices of the absolute vast majority of the population is already destroying the public discourse in this country, and it will likely be looked at by historians in 100+ years as one of the biggest issues that led to the downfall of the United States of America.

Money should not equal speech. Full stop.

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

I would have thought that people who hate the idea of corporate personhood would also hate the idea of any other kind of non-person personhood.

I don't think the general hatred of corporate personhood stems from the logical or taxonomic absurdity of it. Rather, I sense it comes from the perceived effects of it, that in their eyes allow corporations to get away without paying their "fair share".

I think it's an instrument of convenience that has predictably resulted in a lot of legal tech-debt, which is largely inevitable because of how slow we are at adapting laws to our lived realities.

Part of having personhood is that one’s ideas don’t have to have any logical or consistent basis.

no river ever hit me with a strategic lawsuit

Does that make rivers more person-like or less person-like?

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood

Most people understand that incorporated businesses need to own property, enter into contracts and act as either plaintiff or defendant in lawsuits.

And be completely unaccountable in criminal court, for the consequences of their actions.

Don't forget that one. All the rights, none of the responsibility.

For me it goes like this:

Ok if we are already extending personhood to corporations, who with their sheer power transcend individuals, why not also extend that fiction to other entities that would actually need active protection?

Wouldn't corporations do just fine and we would live in a better world if we stripped any form of personhood from corporations? The biggest collision area stemming from corporate personhood is its collision with other, actual persons. The only reason corporate personhood is a thing is because it allows corporate lawyers to pick from a bigger pool of personal rights in a perversion of the spirit of these original rights. Thus watering down the existing right.

> The only reason corporate personhood is a thing is because it allows corporate lawyers to pick from a bigger pool of personal rights in a perversion of the spirit of these original rights.

Not at all. It allows corporations to own property, enter contracts and appear as a plaintiff or defendant in lawsuits. Without legal personhood it could do none of these.

> It allows corporations to own property, enter contracts and appear as a plaintiff or defendant in lawsuits.

And yet these things do basically go all the way back to the Roman empire, and I'm sure the extent and privileges of corporate personhood have been litigated once or twice since then. If you disagree that

> corporate lawyers would like to pick from a bigger pool of personal rights in a perversion of the spirit of these original rights.

then what do you think they were working on?

Not a bad analogy as a river is fed by its watershed (shareholders, inhabitants, landowners, state reserves, etc.) and delivers water downstream (customers, clients, dependents, etc.) as well as having its own inherent structure and function, water quality, biodiversity support (eg providing steady employ to 100K people in a local region, the daily structural business of capital and material flows, etc.).

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

Straw man argument.

I'm for regulating different things differently and as what they are: a corporation should be regulated as a corporation and a river should be regulated as a river.

update: I don't think this comment is correct, after kerkeslager's response to it. I'm leaving it intact underneath so the conversation still makes sense.

People on here almost universally value logical consistency over beneficial outcomes. By the HN moral consensus a rule that can be applied to all situations without modification is a good rule. It does not much matter what outcomes that produces.

> It does not much matter what outcomes that produces.

One outcome would be a predictable and mechanistic process, which reduces the potential for corruption and creates a more fair world. The currently popular legal theory in the US is far worse than "logical consistency" would be, because it's blatantly corrupt and autocratic. See Judge Barret's position on stare decisis (basically "should we honor precedent?") combined with reliance interests (basically "can we change anything without effecting someone?").

You know how division by zero allows you to prove 1=2? There's a similar thing at work when you allow completely contradictory legal systems to just continue with business as usual. Now a few people can do whatever they want with all the appearance of rigor/consistency/process without actually having any. As Leibnitz says, "let us calculate". Or just admit there is no process, and thus no real basis for the authority

I don't buy that. It's not logically consistent to call a corporation a human when everyone knows a corporation isn't human, and the leakiness of the abstraction is obvious.

More likely, HN simply has the same distribution of intelligence (i.e., it's mostly near-average-intelligence people), and HN's members are just as susceptible to the same obvious propaganda as everyone else, especially when it might benefit you. HN is full of people who believe they're future rich people, so anything that benefits the rich is easy for HN folks to believe.

Throw in a bit of flattery for a bunch of people whose self-worth is based in their belief that they are intelligent, and you can manipulate HN folks just as easily as any other population. That's why I refuse to play into that narrative: HN folks aren't more logical than any other group and I refuse to pretend they are.

I have plenty of criticism of the rationalist movement, but one thing I think they get right is that if you are unable to conceive of yourself as irrational, you'll never identify your irrationalities and fix them--if you can't admit you are irrational sometimes, you are doomed to remain as irrational as you are.

Corporations are not legally humans and nobody who isn't either misinformed or purposely strawmanning considers a corporation to be a human. Legal personhood just means that a corporation can be a legal actor and possess certain rights and responsibilities. Perhaps they should have called it persona ficta as they did 800 years ago, but the concept is useful and is not, like others in this thread have suggested, something that greedy corporations use to legally bludgeon the proletariat with.

OK yeah you convinced me.

It does make sense, but from a tech perspective, this smells like a bad hack. "Ooo, writing all new rules with this in mind is a crazy amount of work, but if we just say that a ship implements the Person interface, look, the laws mostly work out!"

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

Well, one protects nature, the other protects profits. They are not the same thing.

A river is nature (maybe), it doesn't protect nature. If a river is a person, and a river floods and destroys my home, can I sue the river?

But you see, the destruction of your house is (protecting) nature.

I'm being facetious, and agree with your point. But I'd go further to say protecting nature is too vague a goal so as to not qualify as a reasonable basis to make laws on top of.

That's not to say there's nothing in nature worth protecting. We should strive to make those things explicit (by having the ugly debates they'll undeniably ellicit), instead of having a game of vague moral grandstanding.

I for one think Pandas get too much care and attention. A species too lazy to reproduce doesn't deserve the resources we pour into them. :D

Could personhood be applied to autonomous cars, potentially absolving manufacturers of all liability, if a car they built, kills a human being?

Seems appropriate here: https://genius.com/Moondog-enough-about-human-rights-lyrics

In other words, why do we have to make something a person in order to give it rights?

Because it's much simpler to inherit laws than to craft a whole new set. Once an entity is declared a person, the rather complex web of existing legislation that applies to personhood automatically takes effect.

Simpler in the short run, but creates tech debt I think.

We don't have to, that's just the way we chose to do it (specifically for groups of humans acting in a commercial context).

To be clear, it's not the way WE chose to do it, it's how CORPORATIONS chose to do it, because it benefits them greatly: corporations can get all the rights that a human can get while being immune to most consequences such as imprisonment and the death penalty.

Corporations benefit from this, we humans don't.

Corporations are neither agents nor beneficiaries. They don't take decisions. (That metaphorical abstraction is sometimes useful: here, it is not.) Some people are deciding to do things this way, and are benefiting from it, and those people are humans.

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

Three replies now, all saying that this is nonsense (including this one). I would venture to say it's the other way around: if you are okay with a river having 'personhood' then that logically leads to being okay with a group of people having 'personhood'.

Elephants, on the other hand, have a better case for 'personhood' than a river. An elephant has autonomy, is thinking, can feel pain, has emotions... a river has none of these things, nor does a corporation (even if the parts {humans} consisting of a corporation do).

Personhood for non-persons is definitely absurd. But if you're actually stuck with a broken system, then the most logical thing to do is at least apply your broken logic consistently. That's an important part of the difference between rule of law and wild corrupt barbarism. Of course it's much better to actually fix absurdities, but if you can't or won't, inconsistency still has to be forbidden or else the whole thing is a farce

I'm a bit reminded of the days before Unix-style pipelining and abstract I/O streams like "standard input and output". Mainframe operating systems would instead support devices like "virtual card readers" and "virtual line printers". When you created a COBOL program on disk and scheduled a compile job for it, the system would set up a virtual card reader to accept the program as input and direct the logs to a virtual printer. How to set this up was specified using JCL on IBM iron.

It seems that "virtual personhood" was set up to address deficiencies in our legal system regarding who or what may be party to a lawsuit, etc.

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