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Comment by bit-anarchist | Hacker News Reader

Because the another personin question is one the constituents acting in behalf of the corporation itself. Perhaps it's closer to suicide, but still, it's not just "another person", but, in a sense, a part of the corporation itself.

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.

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If you could just look at corporations by looking at their members then there would be no need for a legal fiction, because the law could also just look at the members.

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.

I agree that corporations aren't just shorthands for their shareholders. That's why I think the qualifiers "towards a unified goal" and "under a binding normative instrument" are important. Specially the latter one.

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.

Nothing wrong with being philosophical in general. But not so much when talking about how things actually are in a case where there’s very little philosophy behind the setup.

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