Comment by robot-wrangler

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

Only if/because they are reading too much into the concept of legal personhood. A thing being a person doesn't mean the thing is equivalent to a human or that it has every right that every human has. It generally just means that the law attributes certain rights and obligations to that thing because that is more convenient than finding the right human(s) to attribute them to in the circumstances.

For those unfamiliar, personhood status for environmental protection is real (beyond what the original blog mentioned)

NYTimes: In Move to Protect Whales, Polynesian Indigenous Groups Give Them ‘Personhood’ https://archive.is/H5fq8

Nat Geo: This Canadian river is now legally a person. It’s not the only one. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/these-rive...

I wonder how our mental model of nature will evolve over the next decades. For example, in the early 1900's, the United States had more laws protecting animals from overwork than it did for children. That feels unfathomable in today's United States, where animals are treated more as property than people. Perhaps something similar will happen, where we will understand everything as a "legal entity" that has protections.

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

Why do you think this would be the case? I agree with the former but not the latter.

I wouldn’t have so much problem with corporate personhood if we hadn’t decided money was speech.

Plus, if corporations get to be people for all the good stuff, it should require taking the bad bits too. E.g. capital punishment should be on the table.

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

I would have thought that people who hate the idea of corporate personhood would also hate the idea of any other kind of non-person personhood.

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood

Most people understand that incorporated businesses need to own property, enter into contracts and act as either plaintiff or defendant in lawsuits.

Could personhood be applied to autonomous cars, potentially absolving manufacturers of all liability, if a car they built, kills a human being?

It does make sense, but from a tech perspective, this smells like a bad hack. "Ooo, writing all new rules with this in mind is a crazy amount of work, but if we just say that a ship implements the Person interface, look, the laws mostly work out!"

Seems appropriate here: https://genius.com/Moondog-enough-about-human-rights-lyrics

In other words, why do we have to make something a person in order to give it rights?

Not a bad analogy as a river is fed by its watershed (shareholders, inhabitants, landowners, state reserves, etc.) and delivers water downstream (customers, clients, dependents, etc.) as well as having its own inherent structure and function, water quality, biodiversity support (eg providing steady employ to 100K people in a local region, the daily structural business of capital and material flows, etc.).

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

Straw man argument.

I'm for regulating different things differently and as what they are: a corporation should be regulated as a corporation and a river should be regulated as a river.

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

Well, one protects nature, the other protects profits. They are not the same thing.

For me it goes like this:

Ok if we are already extending personhood to corporations, who with their sheer power transcend individuals, why not also extend that fiction to other entities that would actually need active protection?

Wouldn't corporations do just fine and we would live in a better world if we stripped any form of personhood from corporations? The biggest collision area stemming from corporate personhood is its collision with other, actual persons. The only reason corporate personhood is a thing is because it allows corporate lawyers to pick from a bigger pool of personal rights in a perversion of the spirit of these original rights. Thus watering down the existing right.

> Most people who (quite reasonably) hate corporate personhood would probably have a knee-jerk reaction that personhood for a river can/should be normalized.

Three replies now, all saying that this is nonsense (including this one). I would venture to say it's the other way around: if you are okay with a river having 'personhood' then that logically leads to being okay with a group of people having 'personhood'.

Elephants, on the other hand, have a better case for 'personhood' than a river. An elephant has autonomy, is thinking, can feel pain, has emotions... a river has none of these things, nor does a corporation (even if the parts {humans} consisting of a corporation do).