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> Without corporate case law, it would be much easier to shirk accountability. To my eyes, a large part of the purpose of corporations is to shirk individual r
by sooheon 9y ago
> Without corporate case law, it would be much easier to shirk accountability.
To my eyes, a large part of the purpose of corporations is to shirk individual responsibility. What else would LLC stand for?
>You're conflating a lot of distinct issues - principally, the effects of being a corporation and the effects of being incredibly wealthy and politically influential.
I attempted to make it clear that the act of incorporating, ceasing to become merely an individual and existing as part of a group in and of itself has dehumanizing influences. The corrupting influence of group-think, moral smokescreening, and increased degrees of separation from the repercussions of one's actions is orthogonal to the corrupting influence of power. Nazi guards could sleep at night after a long day of executions because they were part of a corrupt group that absolved them of responsibility, not because they were mega rich.
To take BP's example, the blame for the spill results from countless decisions which add up to supreme negligence. But it's hard to pin on a single person, it is the organization itself (and its goals) which caused the problem. This negative influence needs to be curtailed, so I think it's inappropriate to consider a group of individuals as having the exact same rights as its constituents summed. When it comes to rights, I just don't buy that 2+2=4.
>>No, I don't believe corporations deserve any rights whatsoever.
>This statement is logically equivalent to "I don't believe that people should have any rights to coordinate their actions"
It was a bit inflammatory of me to word it that way, but I still disagree that those two things are "logically equivalent". I just don't think it makes sense to think of rights in aggregate. Aggregating rights in the form of corporations leads to weighting of rights by the amount of money you have. The son of the chairman of Samsung can exert far more influence across his network of conglomerates and paper companies than I ever can. Does his million-fold monetary advantage over me give him a million times more rights across his corporate appendages than me? Should I buy a third of a share in his textiles company which has the president's ear if I want to express my rights? Fuck that. Those aren't rights, it's the pure expression of power and violence, the very thing I want society to curtail.