Because corporations aren't people. Full stop.
I don't buy it at all. For example, it's generally considered to be unethical to kill a person aside from limited circumstances such as self defense. Killing a person because they're no longer useful to you is Right Out in every ethical framework I've ever heard of. Are you implying that dissolving a corporation is unethical?
Depends on each jurisdiction. You'd have to look at which frameworks informed the laws that back each corporation.
On the topic of corporate dissolution, I see less as killing and more as natural death. When a corp dissolves in accordance to its norms and general ethics (or the jurisdiction it's under, at least), that's equivalent to someone naturally dying. The constituents no longer wish to participate and follow the binding rules that define the corp to dissolve it, enacting its "will", if you will (pun intended).
Something akin to murder would be a "hostile take over into a dissolution" situation, where a rogue member decides to unilaterally dissolve the corp in defiance of the other members despite having no legal justification, neither in the binding norms of the corp nor in their personal rights (although that's generally implied, as, in theory, no contract can violate this). I think we can agree that the latter case would indeed be unethical, if not illegal.
Also, killing people strictly because they are not useful to you is covered by a "rule by might" ethics framework. Not one I agree with, but it exists.
Really this comes down to sloppy usage of words. You said the phrase yourself: "juridical people." You need that qualifier on it, "juridical," to distinguish from actual human beings. Because they're not the same. "Corporations are people" -> corporations are legal entities that share some of the same rights, privileges, and responsibilities as human beings. "Corporations aren't people" -> corporations are a distinct concept from human beings, including ethically and legally.
Legally, the argument comes down to how precise you're being. Is there an implied qualifier? Is the statement meant to convey that corporations are legally the same as natural persons (they aren't) or just that they are some sort of legal entity? And the whole dispute here is because people are interpreting it differently.
To rephrase the comment some replies above: "Because corporations aren't natural people."
All the discussion about corporate personhood is off the mark, because corporate personhood only means that corporations have some of the rights that natural persons have, and voting is not generally among them. Although apparently it is in one town in Delaware.
I think the dispute is more about interpretation. Ultimately, what I've shown is more of a perspective (one I believe it's useful due to the legal interplay of rights that happen inside), but one can just look at corporations by looking at their members, agents and the rules they've agreed prior and I suspect it would be equivalent to treating corporations as real people, presuming jusnaturalism.
Given that voting is a right currently derived from a more juspositivistic perspective, the justifications behind who's considered a "natural person" and who gets to vote are pretty arbitrary.
But that's not at all what happens. "Meta, Inc." is not just a shorthand way of naming all the shareholders of Meta, Inc. It is a separate legal entity, owned by but not identical to the shareholders.
Why do people bother making corporations in the first place? It's precisely because they want a legal entity that is not themselves. Typically this is so that, for example, the corporation's liabilities are not legally the owner's liabilities. In other words, you form an LLC so that your customers can't sue and take your house.
Your approach is IMO far too philosophical. Corporations are a totally pragmatic construct. They exist because they provide a structure that we as a society consider to be useful in order to promote commerce, innovation, and all that stuff. Nothing about that structure is set up that way because it logically follows from the rights and duties of the owners. It's set up that way because it's supposed to facilitate commerce.
LLCs, in particular, are just one type of corporation and tend to have a well defined set of laws and agreements backing them, with the primary purpose of limiting liabilities towards the owners. Personally, I'm favor of revising the way these liabilities are limited as to internalize externalities.
That being said, the corporation's liabilities not being, necessarily, the constituents' isn't inspired solely on LLC law, but also organic theory.
But, yeah, my approach is pretty philosophical because it is a "philosophy-first, pragmatism-second" one.
Corporations are not "X people". Corporations are not people, period. Natural people are just people.
Try defining what is "people". What is "natural people". Why do "natural people" have "rights". What is a "corporation". How does a "corporation" differ from any other legal fiction. So on.
Corporations are pieces of paper we've scribbled on. Because they are pieces of paper, they cannot be harmed.
This is the primary difference between corporations and people.
People can be harmed through the pieces of paper they've scribbled on. That is material. But do not mistake that for the paper being harmed. It can't be. It's just a piece of paper.
2. What is murder? Why is killing justified in certain cases (e.g. self defense, death penalties, abortions, etc.) and not in others?
3. What is the piece of paper of a corporation? What makes it different any other piece of paper? I don't think USA's agents are harming people through pieces of papers.
4. What is harm? Consider when someone puts fire into one of Meta's unoccupied buildings who gets harmed.
It might help to picture them as literally a piece of paper. It would be pretty silly to say that piece of paper has a "will of its own" or "rights" or calling it a "person", wouldn't it?
If I scribble "i am a person" on a piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. If I get a bunch of people to join in and scribble something on the same piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. There's no confusion over "rights" or "will". It's a piece of paper.
The anthropomorphization simply emerges out of a shared property in this context. Keep in mind I haven't said anything about biology.
People, of course, have rights. Corporations are not people, including "juridical people". They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights. Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people.
Even the naive perspective over this recognizes that the corporation has "rights" by being proxies of their constituents, so you are correct in saying "Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people."
However, a more careful analysis recognizes that the exercised rights of a corp comes from a combination of the rights of its members, often in intermingled way (due to binding norms of the corp) that doesn't map directly into a singular individual. As such, it's common to abstract it as the "rights of the corporation". You can look at the individual rights (sometimes you have to), but that's like looking at humans by their individual cells. Certainly doable, but cumbersome most of the time.
Also, I find the phrase "They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights" funny. As if rights weren't legal fiction themselves. Not that this means much either, ethics and law are about "what ought to be done", and that's - objectively - as fictional as you can get.
> being proxies of their constituents
These proxies have no rights. People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights. That legal fiction inherits no rights from the owners, which is where the analogy fails. There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.
Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence. That tolerance is finite. When that tolerance ends, so does the legal fiction's existence. Unlike with people, there are no moral quandaries with revoking the privilege of existence.
Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic. We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.
> People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights.
How exactly do you think they can create these legal fictions? Through their rights. That's how corporations inherit them. Keep in mind I'm not focusing on LLCs, but the more broader concept, that also includes an organized society under a common set of rules.
> There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.
There's clearly something, as "Microsoft" and "Google" are distinct entities. To imply there's nothing is to imply there's no difference.
> Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence.
Who is "society" here? Everyone? Clearly not, or else this trial would not have reached this conclusion while others complain in the internet about its results. Generally, it refers to a group of people bound by a set of rules (the constituion, laws, etc.), i.e. a corporation. So it's a bit funny that a legal fiction decides whether other legal fictions exist.
> Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic.
We are in a discussion about whether corporations have rights or not. It ultimately will touch on the source of rights and where they are derived from.
> We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.
Which doesn't do much against rights being legal fiction. Or corporations having rights.
I have the legal right as a person to write on a piece of paper "i am a person". That piece of paper does not inherit any rights by my doing so.
Me writing "Microsoft" on one paper and "Google" on another paper certainly means that those two pieces of paper are distinct. Neither one, however, has rights.
What I meant by intermingling/combination/whatever is that, there are no rights to inherit, because a piece of paper has no rights, inherited or otherwise. That includes intermingled rights of people. People may have complex intermingled rights on certain subjects. That is not applicable to legal fictions, because they don't have rights and can't inherit rights.
I think it will become clear as you picture the silly idea of writing "I'm a piece of paper and I have rights" and then expecting that to mean anything. Work backwards from there.
There's, objectively, an intermingling of rights happening inside an corporation, which derives directly from the "under a normative instrument" part of the definition of a corporation, which creates legal interactions between the rights of the members. That's simply a fact.
And, again, may I remind you, "rights", "laws", "norms", etc. are legal fiction. They don't have an actual corporeal body. Arguably, corporations have more of one given that they have agents, and the actions they do, on behalf of the corporation, is very material.
No, it's just a piece of paper.
Yes, rights/laws/norms/etc are legal fiction. Harm is material. Without harm, there's not much purpose to a legal system. A bad legal system lets someone harm someone else, and then wave around a piece of paper saying "Oh, it was this piece of paper that did it, not me, I'm not responsible!"
A good legal system recognizes that that's absurd. We currently play along far too much, and Citizens United was a breaking point for many people.
Even in our broken legal system, we recognize this fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
Also, mentioning in the "Citizens United v. FEC" case along with "Piercing the corporate veil" concept is a bit funny, because if you pierce the corporate veil of Citizens United in that court case, and look at it as "the shareholders behind Citizens United v. FEC", you will actually strengthen the majority opinion of the Court.
Honestly, I don't think it's me who has a broken world view, but you. I keep two perspectives in regards to corporations: an individualistic one (which backs the "pierce the corporate veil") and a organic one, inspired by system theory and emergent properties, and I try to not mix them without appropriate care. On the other hand, you seem to hold grievances that are only related, but not directly connected, to corporate personhood. In particular, no offense, your perspective about the law seems rather reductive.