Soylent Green is corporations!!!

A great, concise, and cutting opinion piece by Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting, which explores exactly how for-profit corporations are antithetical to democracy. It's not the usual structuralist argument; Gutting instead underlines something we all instinctively know ("The corporate threat is most apparent in advertising, which explicitly aims at convincing us to prefer a product regardless of its actual merit."), and concludes that corporations are necessarily a "threat to truth," a value fundamental to democracy. He contrasts corporate speech with the political speech of groups such as the ACLU and the NRA, who at least theoretically represent the convictions of actual people. Corporations, in Gutting's analysis, are not evil, per se. They are, however, necessarily amoral, and that's what makes them dangerous.

I commented on the piece as follows (tongue in both cheeks):

     If corporations are people, do their lives begin at conception? What about a corporation conceived in an ill-advised, late-night financial planning session? Should the parties be allowed to terminate their creation on the morning after, or be forced to bring it to term, even if they're not ready to raise a corporation? What if the partnership ends? Visitation rights?

     There's a lot the Supreme Court didn't think of, methinks.

     Although, if corporations were people, you could take out restraining orders on them, right? As it stands (at least here in Arizona), a corporation can obtain an "injunction against workplace harassment" against a journalist or whistleblower. (This is absolutely true, and yes, it's oft abused.) But it doesn't work the other way around: you can't get a restraining order against a corporation. Corporate peoplehood would change that, no?

     Wouldn't it be nice to get a restraining order on your favourite bill-collector? One stray communique, and they're suddenly doing time for felony harassment. . .