Reading 08: Corporate Personhood, IBM and the Holocaust
Corporate Personhood is the legal notion that a corporation has some of the legal rights and responsibilities of a human person. Obviously a corporation could never truly resemble a person, but they have still been given several human rights over the years. The ramifications of corporate personhood are that, legally, corporations share some of the rights that humans do, such as being able to enter into contracts with another, suing and being sued in court, and, on religious grounds, refuse to comply with a federal mandate to provide coverage for birth control in employee health plans, to name some examples. However, not all legal rights that are afforded to a person are afforded to corporations, notably that a corporation cannot plead the fifth. Because corporations are afforded some of the rights that humans have, they are expected follow the same social and ethical standards that a human would. Yet, despite this expectation, a corporation cannot be arrested.
In terms of the IBM and the Holocaust case study, I do not believe that IBM was ethical in doing business with Nazi Germany. It does not matter if the assistance is coming from an individual person or a group of people and resources labeled as a ‘corporation’: If you are supporting an evil regime as it attempts to exterminate an entire race, then you are being unethical. I think corporations must absolutely take responsibility for unethical use of their products. It is obviously tempting for corporations to chase after profit in any way that they can, but a corporation should never allow itself to profit off of the suffering of human beings. It is therefore the corporation’s responsibility to rescind its services to those who would use their products in immoral and unethical ways. Preferable, a corporation should refrain from doing business at all with those who would use its products unethically and immorally.
If we are to build up this idea of corporate personhood and say that, legally, corporations have some of the same rights that humans do, then they should also be beholden to the same ethical and moral standards that humans are. Personhood comes with not only rights, but also responsibilities to act in ways that will benefit, not harm, other persons. Take the IBM and the Holocaust case study as an example: If a person was helping Nazi Germany plan how to find, round-up, transport, and murder as many Jewish people as they could and as efficiently as possible, then this person is obviously acting immorally and unethically, as they are contributing to genocide and are a collaborator in the Holocaust. How can we say that a corporation doing this is any less unethical or immoral? Put simply, we cannot. IBM willingly and knowingly contributed sold their Hollerith equipment to Nazi Germany, providing resources for the attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. Whether or not IBM originally knew that the Hollerith machines would be used for that purpose is irrelevant: When they understood what their products would be used for, they should have immediately pulled support and halted any dealings with their buyers, just like an individual would be expected to do.
