This whole idea of a corporation being like a person reminds me of an experience I had in a humanities course in college.
We were reading some of the works of Plato. The descriptions of discussions between Socrates and one of his students used to drive me nuts. They would be discussing some subject and Socrates would say “isn’t a person like a horse”. In the context in which this came up, the student would agree. Then Socrates would say, “Well if you agree that a person is like a horse, then you must also agree to this other proposition.” The other proposition would always be some way in which a person does not in anyway resemble a horse. As Plato described it, the student would essentially respond, “Well, I guess you got me there. Because I agreed to the horse analogy before, I must agree to this ridiculous proposition.”
I wrote a paper mentioning what an idiotic way this was to reason about the world. I was rewarded with a D on that paper. This was the highest grade I ever got on a paper in that class, but I don’t think it was because the professor agreed with me. Maybe the D was because I got my sister, an English major, to help me with the paper. I wish she had told me that you don’t get good grades by criticizing the books that the professor has chosen for you to read.
Maybe the other lesson is that we need more technically trained Supreme Court justices, lawyers, and Congress members who understand a thing or two about logic. (and fewer non-technically trained humanities professors at a technical college like this professor and the art history professor that thought perpendicular and parallel were synonyms.)
I posted the original version of this as a comment on a thread on Tangelia Sinclair-Moore’s facebook page.
Just in case you have trouble making the connection between this post and anything that is happening in the world these days, I offer this explanation. This post is prompted by the brouhaha over the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overrule the restrictions on corporate spending on political advocacy. The arguments pro and con for this ruling seem to revolve around earlier precedent that a corporation is a person for purposes of applying the law.
Well, a corporation is not a person, it is a corporation. If it is like a person in some respect, then you can apply the law to it like a person because of the similarity in the instance under consideration. You don’t then abandon the notion of how it was like a person in that particular case and then go on to treat it like a person in other cases just because you used that analogy once in an unrelated matter. Such leaps of logic result in legal decisions that have little basis in reality and are very hard to defend as sensible.
Maybe the solution is to realize that the people in a corporation should be allowed to get together to spend money for political advocacy, but not as part of a corporation legally chartered by the state for some other purpose. Since a corporation is legally chartered by the state, the state should be able to define the rules about what people in the corporation can do in the name of the corporation. If people don’t like those rules, then they can form a group as something else, other than a corporation. What people in the corporation do when not acting in the name of the corporation comes under a different set of rules.
Of course how you separate a particular piece of advocacy from the original charter of the corporation can be very problematic.
My examples of news media corporations or magazine publishing corporations are immediately troublesome. Particularly for a magazine, its whole reason for being may be political advocacy. Freedom of the press is also protected by the First Amendment.
Non-media companies are allowed to advertise their products and tell you why you should buy them. T. Boone Pickens recently got into the business of wind energy and started airing commercials promoting wind energy. Is this political or corporate related?
Being a Supreme Court Justice is hard work. Where have I heard a statement like that before?