In a lot of ways our ideas of corporations are fucked up, but I don't think this Supreme Court decision depends on bad wording; I think it depends on the problem that we have an unspeakably awful bunch of Supreme Court justices, who are willing to use the flimsiest justifications imaginable to issue decisions favorable to corporate interests. I'm sure even they realize that corporations can't vote, and cannot be either the victims or perpetrators of a wide variety of criminal acts. Their decision to arbitrarily add speech rights to the list of ways in which corporations are treated as people is completely arbitrary.
尽管如此，人们对公司还是有一个糟糕的概念。有限责任是一种特权，而不是权利!如果公司没有给我们足够的利益来换取这种特权，我们就完全有理由增加条件，要求额外的费用和税收，甚至在他们无法兑现承诺的好处时取消特权。

我不认为公司的想法(为了盈利，不为盈利，公共的，私人的)一定是一个坏主意。在我看来，一个问题是，当涉及到“拉”公司的条款或章程时，我们的民选官员几乎没有什么脊梁。
Instead of listing what a corporation CAN do, I ascribe to the position that we should only put limits (what you CAN NOT DO) on the corporation as we find the need to do so. Generally, that is how we should govern corporations (as leaders/managers) and make our laws. You are free to pursue your own ends as long as you do not damage or abridge someone else's rights.
What we are complaining about here is that we have a discovered that those who we have elected to lead and protect us in this representative democracy are not doing so. The government agencies have failed us because they are as or more intoxicated with greed than the businesses they are supposed to be regulating. Of course, it would be nice if regulation weren't necessary, and yet companies comprise human beings with all their strengths and weaknesses.
Whenever business leaders confuse the measurement (the financials) to be the reason for the corporate existence (serving stakeholders not just stockholders) they lose their way. The state/federal regulators who bestow the privilege of articles of incorporation and charters to conduct business must also hold us accountable and be willing to rescind those privileges. That will not happen until such time as we make sure the companies being regulated are not funding the regulators and that elected officials cannot legally receive ANY funds from business beyond that which individuals are allowed to contribute.

First, as a laws/philo major graduate I'd like to point out that one of the primary reasons for conceiving of corporations as having legal personalities (as distinguishable, say, from human personalities) is precisely so that we can hold them accountable for things.
法律可能没有跟上这一条的细节(例如，公司在为股东的“最佳利益”行事时，不考虑底线以外的任何事情)。然而，在谈论公司作为法律实体时，法院实际上开启了一种对话，不仅是关于公司的权利，而且是关于公司的责任。There is potentially (and some would argue, probably) a great deal of good that can be made of this rhetoric into the future when perhaps corporations, as legal personalities, will be directly accountable for things like the environmental impact of their director's decision making, and so on.
也许这一领域的法律与美国宪法(以及硬性的权利法案模式)相互作用的方式是特别不幸的。我想看看你所说的最高法院的判决。
But, if this is true, it's an issue of statutory interpretation - economically conservative judicial (anti?)activism - that is the root problem and not the concept of the corporation as a legal entity itself.

While I tend to agree with the general tenor of the show [i.e. the decision was a poor one prompted mainly by political concerns] it seems to me a much more interesting show would have ensued from having a guest who was a strong advocate of the decision. The range of opinions didn't cover much ground. Listeners were left, I think, with the notion that there was little in the way of a rational reason for it. I think the discussion would have left the Chief Justice shaking his head and muttering under his breath.

Thanks for writing such a thoughtful piece on this topic.
公司是作为一种特定类型的法律实体而创立的，不应该以任何方式赋予人的权利。这太疯狂了，我希望有更多的人站出来说出来。当人类最终清醒过来，意识到公司不应该拥有太大的权力时，历史将把“公司人格”视为商业如何在这个国家成为一种新的宗教形式的象征，而且它的影响力太大了。

I have to admit that the discussion was a little more one-sided than most discussions on our show tend to be. But I think that's partly because as John says in the main entry, there really is only one side to this issue. But it's also partly because the court, in applying the concept of a corporate personality, has done very little hard reflection about what exactly corporate personality amounts to -- especially in recent years. You could have two different views, I suppose, of the corporation as person -- both with historical antecedents. On one view, the corporation as person is an "artificial person" and is therefore only a person in a restricted, special sense. Once you distinguished between natural and artificial persons, you would have to do decide to what extent and on what grounds the constitution requires you to extend the rights clearly afforded to natural persons to artificial persons. For example, the 14th amendment refers to persons "born or naturalized" within the United States and declares that they are citizens. It seems pretty absurd on it's face to think that corporations count as either born or naturalized citizens. Doesn't it? If so, then they can't possibly enjoy the "privileges and immunities" of citizens. And it's not clear at all what, if any, privileges and immunities the constitution requires be extend to these non citizen, non natural, artificial persons ( a category of "persons" not at all explicitly mentioned in the constitution anywhere.)
On the other hand, you could, I suppose, that corporations are, in some sense, "natural" persons. And if you thought that, you could think that corporations automatically get the full panoply of personal rights. It would be a little hard to argue for this, to say the least.
Here's sort of a stab at an argument. It might go from the fact that what an individual can do, collectivities of individuals can (often) also do -- things like asserting, promising, contracting, associating, etc. And you might argue that if individuals have certain rights in the doing of these things then they don't lose those rights when acting collectively. Perhaps collectivities of persons just inherit the rights and responsibilities of the individuals that constitute them.
这种方法的问题在于，它完全误解了有限责任公司的性质。公司不仅仅是代理人的集合体，这些代理人从共同“构成”公司的个人那里继承特权和豁免权。个人并不是这样“构成”公司的。我的意思是，从法律上讲，公司的行为不能归属于作为一个集体拥有公司的个人。从某种奇怪的意义上说，公司是独立的实体。股东对公司行为的法律责任只在他们投资于公司的范围内体现了这一点。因此，如果一家公司向海湾倾倒数百万桶石油，造成广泛的经济损失和环境破坏，该公司的股东，也就是它的“所有者”，冒着失去公司股份的风险，但仅此而已。他们的其他资产在任何程度上都没有风险。作为个人，他们不需要对公司的行为负全部责任，因为公司的行为不是他们个人的行为，也不是他们的集体行为。换句话说，公司的行为不是他们的行为。
This construal of the corporation as a free-standing actor, spares and shields shareholders from full liability for acts of an entity that they own and that has a fiduciary obligation to act on their behalf. That my make economic sense, since it encourages a kind of risk-taking. But it makes almost no moral sense. But more particularly, it helps to show that the corporation can't really be viewed as natural persons, straightforwardly constituted by the cooperative activities of those who own the corporation. And once you see that, it seems pretty obvious on its face that you can't straight-forwardly argue from the rights of the individuals that "own" the corporation to the rights of the corporate entity that individuals constitute through cooperative activity.
There's a third way, I guess, you could think about corporations and rights. You could think something like this. Well, the right of free speech serves a certain purpose -- making for free, unfettered debate and competition in the market place of ideas. Then you could think that the purpose of the free speech clause of the constitution would be advanced by giving such rights to corporations and thwarted by denying such rights to corporations. Hence, we should give such rights to corporations.
注意，这种思维方式并没有涉及到公司是自然人这个奇怪的想法。这是一种纯粹的实用主义方法，并没有表明对公司人格的立场。但一旦有人这样想，似乎各种各样的考虑都应该发挥作用——比如企业财富对政治进程可能产生的腐败影响。有人会认为，权衡这些竞争因素的相对重要性应该是立法机关的事，而不是法院的事。

Great article. This is an issue that must be addressed, good work on taking the initiative. That government was even willing to consider this syntactical fallacy, is erroneous by the first degree, even though it is an attempt with maybe some good intentions behind it. Great argument.
End Corporate Globalism's influence over Washington D.C.!

我请了相当聪明的法律学者拉里·瑞普斯坦(Larry Ripstein)来评论这篇文章。
He didn't and here is his blog on BP.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/24/bp-oil-spill-anadarko-opinions-columnis...
瑞普斯坦并不愚蠢，但作为一名律师和哲学博士，我觉得他的话愚蠢得令人难以忍受。
So, before I go off on rant on his blog, could Ken and John please salvage -if they can- something of Ripstein's argument.
(我的妻子和我们的双胞胎提前感谢你。只要能让爸爸不在家里闲着，嘴里念叨着低能儿就行。)

I was a bit disappointed in the dialog about corporations as persons for the sole reason that it avoided defining personhood. It seems to me that personhood necessitates that one is a moral agent, and the problem with defining corporations as persons is that they are not capable of acting as moral agents. I believe that there is a line of philosophy that particularly addresses groups as having "rights" or acting as moral agents, but I'm not up on it.
Thanks for a wonderful program.
Olivia

Edward Thurlow (1731?1806), Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, is said to have asked rhetorically,
"did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked?",
It seems his exact phrase (John Poynder Literary Extracts (1844) vol. 1, p. 2 or 268.) was even more to the point:
"Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like."

There was a 19th century Supreme Court decision that made corporations "artificial persons." Does anyone know the name and year of that SCOTUS decision?
E-mail me with the answer:politicalwiz55@aol.com
Thanks

那是一个完全不同的话题。是的，值得思考的是，把公司称为人有什么意义!难道立法者们的词汇量和逻辑能力如此之差，以至于他们找不到另一个合适的词，对企业的另一个定义?哈!读得不错!

我对最高法院的这个决定感到震惊和震惊，因为它基本上让公司“购买”选举。一旦你把一家公司定义为一个人，他们就可以自由地向一个候选人捐赠多少，而不会产生什么后果。这完全破坏了我们的民主概念，即政府是由人民塑造的。公司和人有不同的利益和更多的钱。最近Target公司向一名极右翼候选人捐赠了15万美元。在他们滥用公司权力和滥用民主而失去我的信任之后，我就不会再去那里购物了。

I think our Constitution is written in a way that refers to 'person', 'people', or 'individual' as property owners. By writing that slaves are to be considered three-fifths of a man, the document leaves the concept of person open to interpretation. The same can be said about how it only talks of men and not women. By giving value to people based on their wealth and means, it is not a far stretch to say a corporation counts as a person. In fact the Constitution defines 'person' in way that makes the corporation seem more like a 'person' than the biological entity that we usually think of as a 'person.' Any number of caste systems throughout history have given rights to people based on wealth. If how much of a person you are is based on how much you are worth, then a corporation is more of a person then I am. This does not really get at the core of the issue of why we need to even use the term 'person' to refer to a corporation. It is more about the intentions of the Constitution. It can be interpreted as a document that protects the wealthy minority from the majority written with deliberately broad language that guarantees rights to the many but still protects the property of the wealthiest class. This includes slave owners whose fortunes would be greatly diminished without slave labor. Even 'people' could be considered property. So newer concepts like ' the corporation' or "1%ers" are just different ways to talk about rights and power in America. The question of what a 'person' 'is' is an ongoing dialogue.