'Corporations Are People' Is Built on an Incredible 19th-Century Lie

The Atlantic ^ | Mar 5, 2018 | Adam Winkler

[markomalley]

Thanks. It helps when I have had this discussion several other times (IRL and on other forums) over the years.

[Mmmike]

Corporations are legal abstractions, formulated to capture those aspects of personhood which they deem to be to their advantage while making no claims as to the rest. They do not have souls or emotions, for instance. Their longevity and physical reach often far exceed that of true persons, hence they are ontologically different than persons, whether positive law says so or not.

[schurmann]

“The article is fundamentally, factually wrong. The concept of a “juridic person” comes from the Catholic Church and has its origin in antiquity. ... I recognize that since the concept was established by the Catholic Church, there will be some here who will reflexively be against ...” [markomalley, post 89]

Bundles of thanks to markomalley for crafting a clear, accurate, succinct summary. Not common on this website.

If an idea or an object furthers our efforts, we ought not hesitate to use it. Fretting about where a concept originated is to miss seeing the forest for the trees. Willfully.

Are there risks? Always. It falls to us to determine what they are, and minimize them. Foregoing benefits because there are chances of this or that failure is unwise. Benefits always have to be traded off against each other: it’s the essence of small-p pragmatism and small-u utilitarianism.

[schurmann]

“Judging people’s actions in previous times by today’s standards is less useful than the author claims. It leads to errors in judgement ...”

bufaloguy has a gift for understatement.

“presentism” - judging people of “then” by the standards of “now” - had pushed the academic study of history to the brink of disaster. Few can admit it, but I deem it a tactic of the Left.

And it’s an effective one. I’ve not listened to every last academic spout off, but just about every one of them I have heard opining on morals has declared that the moral standards we should use to form judgments are those of the Left.