Comment by kerkeslager a day ago
> 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.
> It does not much matter what outcomes that produces.
One outcome would be a predictable and mechanistic process, which reduces the potential for corruption and creates a more fair world. The currently popular legal theory in the US is far worse than "logical consistency" would be, because it's blatantly corrupt and autocratic. See Judge Barret's position on stare decisis (basically "should we honor precedent?") combined with reliance interests (basically "can we change anything without effecting someone?").
You know how division by zero allows you to prove 1=2? There's a similar thing at work when you allow completely contradictory legal systems to just continue with business as usual. Now a few people can do whatever they want with all the appearance of rigor/consistency/process without actually having any. As Leibnitz says, "let us calculate". Or just admit there is no process, and thus no real basis for the authority
I don't buy that. It's not logically consistent to call a corporation a human when everyone knows a corporation isn't human, and the leakiness of the abstraction is obvious.
More likely, HN simply has the same distribution of intelligence (i.e., it's mostly near-average-intelligence people), and HN's members are just as susceptible to the same obvious propaganda as everyone else, especially when it might benefit you. HN is full of people who believe they're future rich people, so anything that benefits the rich is easy for HN folks to believe.
Throw in a bit of flattery for a bunch of people whose self-worth is based in their belief that they are intelligent, and you can manipulate HN folks just as easily as any other population. That's why I refuse to play into that narrative: HN folks aren't more logical than any other group and I refuse to pretend they are.
I have plenty of criticism of the rationalist movement, but one thing I think they get right is that if you are unable to conceive of yourself as irrational, you'll never identify your irrationalities and fix them--if you can't admit you are irrational sometimes, you are doomed to remain as irrational as you are.
Corporations are not legally humans and nobody who isn't either misinformed or purposely strawmanning considers a corporation to be a human. Legal personhood just means that a corporation can be a legal actor and possess certain rights and responsibilities. Perhaps they should have called it persona ficta as they did 800 years ago, but the concept is useful and is not, like others in this thread have suggested, something that greedy corporations use to legally bludgeon the proletariat with.
update: I don't think this comment is correct, after kerkeslager's response to it. I'm leaving it intact underneath so the conversation still makes sense.
People on here almost universally value logical consistency over beneficial outcomes. By the HN moral consensus a rule that can be applied to all situations without modification is a good rule. It does not much matter what outcomes that produces.