Corporate Personhood

In 1871 the Dictionary Act was passed. This act made it so that in any legislation “the word person may extend and be applied to bodies politic and corporate.” In 1984 this act was reworded. It says  that in any legislation  “the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.” This means that since 1871 businesses are considered people with all the rights, liberties and responsibilities that entails. This a ridiculous policy that is not only impractical , it can  be harmful.

It is an impractical policy because of the basic fact that businesses are not actually people. They have no physical body and are not capable of making decisions. Without these how is business supposed to exercise their rights For example how would Wendy’s use “her” right to bear arms? Is she allowed to install guns on her property? Another example of impracticality would be Microsoft using “his” right  to vote. Is “he” old enough to vote? What about signing up for the draft? How do we tell if a corporation is male or female? Who would be sent to war if there was a draft? Clearly businesses are not people. It can be argued that they are a group of people capable of accepting at least some rights and responsibilities of corporate person hood. A company is comprised of shareholders, board members, employees and customers. So out of this massive group of people who exactly gets these rights and responsibilities and what limits do they have? For the most part this question has gone unanswered and the answers we have gotten have made an impractical policy a harmful one.

One of the main problems with considering businesses to be people is accountability.  When a company commits a crime who is held responsible? This is a complicated question. We can say that whoever initiated the crime is responsible. For example say a manager tells his employees not to report a specific type of income. Well we could say that just that manager is responsible. The problems arise when we consider whether that managers boss knew about the crime or even pressured the manager to do it. What about the lower level employees? Even though they were doing what they were told that does not mean that they are allowed to commit a  crime.  Prosecutors often charge the corporation itself because of the complicated relationships of a business. The problem is that you can not imprison a business. Instead the punishment comes in the form of fines. These fines are not paid by the people responsible for the crime but by the company as a whole. This means that whoever was responsible will not have any consequences. Another problem stems for the fact that businesses have free speech. This right has been used to speak out on controversial issues. We need to keep in mind how many different people t make up a business and  that they are not allowed to discriminate. It then becomes apparent that there is no possible way for a company to have only one opinion on an issue. So what gives the CEO or majority shareholder or whoever it is the right to say that that company as a whole has a specific opinion?  Also, what happens if that opinion has negative consequence for certain members of the business. For example,  a company says that it is against same sex marriage.  It is then boycotted for that statement, is it fair for employees to be laid off, when they were not consulted about this statement and may have a different opinion? The same issues apply when a business says it is part of a specific religion. Who gets to decide that religion and why are they the ones who  get to decide? If the business is following the law and not discriminating, then there is going to be someone in the company of a different faith. Even worse is when the company uses this religion to impose their own guidelines about what can and can not happen within the company. The recent hobby lobby case is a perfect example. Someone within the company decided that the entire company was Christian and that contraception and abortion is against their religion. These beliefs are not representative of everyone within the company but they are now exempt from a federal law that requires businesses to provide insurance that includes contraceptive and abortion care. Recent legislation in Indiana has also made it so that business can refuse to serve certain customers based on the companies religious view. Religion is an extremely personal concept, so something that is not a person can’t have one.

America has been dealing with this impractical and harmful policy for 144 years. Among  these problems I have not seen how this benefits anyone. It seems clear that we need to change the definition of a person to the actual dictionary definition. A person is “a human being regarded as an individual.”