The Corporate Baby in the Bathwater: Why Proposals to Abolish Corporate Personhood Are Misguided
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Author
Gindis, David
Singer, Abraham
Attention
2299/25329
Abstract
The fear that business corporations have claimed unwarranted constitutional protections which have entrenched corporate power has produced a broad social movement demanding that constitutional rights be restricted to human beings and corporate personhood be abolished. We develop a critique of these proposals organized around the three salient rationales we identify in the accompanying narrative, which we argue reflect a narrow focus on large business corporations, a misunderstanding of the legal concept of personhood, and a failure to distinguish different kinds of constitutional rights and the reasons for assigning them. Corporate personhood and corporate constitutional rights are not problematic per se once these notions are decoupled from biological, metaphysical or moral considerations. The real challenge is that we need a principled way of thinking about the priority of human over corporate persons which does not reduce the efficacy of corporate institutions or harm liberal democracies.
Publication date
2023-03-30Published in
Journal of Business EthicsPublished version
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-05019-4Other links
http://hdl.handle.net/2299/25329Metadata
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