Question

Does treating corporations as people sound appropriate? Do you think corporations should have rights?

Answer 1

The Supreme Court granted some of the same constitutional rights to corporations as citizens in various cases. Explicitly, the First, Fifth and Fourteenth amendments protect them. The First Amendment protects freedom of religion, the right to freedom of speech and the right to peaceful assembly. Any entity whose existence benefits society broadly has certain fundamental rights. But any such entity has responsibilities that accumulate with its agency in correlation. And in response to how they exercise this agency, the rights of any such entity must be able to be balanced and curtailed. The key to the argument of "corporation as an individual" is not the extent of corporate rights, but the effectiveness of corporate controls and consequences in protecting the rights of all people.

Obviously, human rights are the most debated, but not always accepted. Life, liberty, happiness, and self-determination are among our negotiated rights, and some degree of freedom of speech, expression, self-protection, due process, and equal protection should be universal, even though research is still required. Property rights are at a lower, but still important, level. More broadly, they can become the worst social entity possible: essential: providing credit, employment, energy, infrastructure, while also being terminally malignant: seizing individuals ' wealth, poisoning the environment, and creating widespread instability. They give human beings immense power while isolating them from their responsibilities in society. As such, in many cases it is ordinary people's bad actions within the corporation's safe walls that create the worst societal costs.

A business is a type of business that allows owners to come and go over time, but the business remains. In comparison to a sole proprietorship where the owner can sell or close the business if he retires, dies, etc. A corporation is deemed to be a legal entity (an artificial person) in that land, and it can extend and contract the business, but it is always linked back to the individuals who make the decisions. So it can only be said that individuals have rights, and whatever the company does, the owners or employees are responsible. You wouldn't say a company committed theft or murder, for example. You'd always hold a person accountable. Rights apply properly only to an entity which has to act for its own survival on its own judgment. Such as a human being. Not a legal document or a property.