Corporate personhood

Is a corporation a person? There are many approaches to responding.

In the most literal legal terms, yes. Treating companies as people is a very old practice, older than the United States. It wasn't decided arbitrarily, and it wasn't forced upon us by powerful global giants like Wal-Mart. It actually makes sense. But instead of the legal perspective, let's take a scientific one.

I can imagine our cells arguing about whether a human being really qualifies as a genuine cell.

These are simply different levels of organization: Cells, whole animals, corporations/countries/societies. They have similarities as collective entities, but also critical differences.

Some people say that a corporation is made up of humans, and hence the true responsibility lies with the humans, whose collective actions somehow bring about the corporation's actions. But I think this is too simple. It ignores the fact that a genuinely new level of organization has been created. The idea of "corporate personhood" at least acknowledges this reality.

In terms of individual atoms, there is no such thing as a "metal." That is a collective phenomenon. So is ferromagnetism -- iron atoms will individually antialign with an applied magnetic field, not align like a chunk of iron will.

Groups of people do not behave like individual people. On this basis, some people are tempted into calling corporations "sociopaths," but that is really not accurate either.

Corporations are just corporations. They should be treated as the whole entities that they are (not broken into their human components), but neither should we expect this entity to behave like an individual human.

That's the challenge: What is this collective thing? How does it work? Where are its buttons and levers, and how can we push and pull them to bring about beneficial results for us? This has been the project of corporate law for centuries.

And it is, after all, exactly what our cells are doing to us.