Reading 08: Corporate Personhood Is All Kinds of Gray

Are corporations people? No, of course they aren’t.

But, they aren’t completely not people.

The issue of corporate personhood involves the idea that corporations are separate from the individual shareholders and employees of the company and that corporations deserve some legal rights of natural citizens.

However, the concept can often be taken much too far in giving too many rights to corporations, but can also be stripped of all of its importance.

We shouldn’t necessarily decide to jump to extremes. There aren’t only two options — corporations are either people with all the rights of US citizens or not independent entities whatsoever.

We don’t have to reduce the issue to two extreme solutions. In fact we should be very careful to avoid such oversimplifications.

Kent Greenfield makes a lot of compelling arguments in his article in The Atlantic about exactly this point. As a society we can’t treat corporations exactly like people. They just aren’t people. The things that make each of us individuals just aren’t present in corporations. Corporations don’t have feelings, they don’t have consciences, and they arguably don’t even possess morals.

So, why would we say they are people and grant them all of the same rights and privileges as each of us living and breathing human beings?

A corporation is not a person, but it’s something. It’s not just the employees that make it up. It’s something separate. It’s a completely separate entity — a corporation, if you will.

If it sounds obvious it’s because it is. A corporation is just that — a corporation. Yes some of the same rights that apply to people apply to corporations, but not all of them do and many of those that do don’t apply in the same way for corporations as they do for people.

Corporate law isn’t black and white in that it can be completely defined by entities. No, corporate law is much more gray. It’s complicated and corporations should be regulated as a unique type of entity.

Most importantly, corporate law must prioritize the rights of citizens over those of corporations and not permit corporations to infringe on citizens’ rights.

The recent sociopolitical climate within the United States has certainly not been kind and welcoming to many groups, including Muslims, immigrants, and refugees. The current White House administration has taken a very clear stance towards targeting these groups, specifically in not ruling out the possibility of a Muslim registry and making intentions clear to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

The views of the administration create the worrying possibility of a large database/registry being created to track and persecute specific groups of people, specifically the building of a Muslim registry.

As a result, tech companies and tech workers alike have pledged to never help create such a database or registry. Several major tech companies made such pledges like Google, Apple, Uber, Microsoft, and Lyft. For example, in the last cited article, a Google spokesperson was reported saying, “In relation to the hypothetical of whether we would ever help build a ‘Muslim registry’ — we haven’t been asked, of course we wouldn’t do this and we are glad — from all that we’ve read — that the proposal doesn’t seem to be on the table.”

So in this instance, companies have projected their own moral and ethical views on their company in order to take a stance on an issue. In this instance, the companies acted within their rights guaranteed under the first amendment.

However, while these tech corporations acted within their rights in this instance, these rights need to be granted to corporations very carefully. If applied too leniently, these rights could easily be abused by corporations. It is important that these rights are only allowed in ways that do not infringe on the rights of third parties (i.e. citizens).

So, basically, for a company to be moral or ethical it must do so in a way that does not place itself or a small number of people over the rights of others.

Naturally, this type of distinction makes it difficult to determine when corporations should be allowed the rights of citizens and when they should be restricted.

It’s not black and white — just a whole lot of gray.