Spent part of this windy, cold and mostly unpleasant morning contemplating the concept of “corporation” as “person,” which on the face of it seems a bit odd.
Contemplating such things with Google at your fingertips can wander you down some interesting corridors. First, for instance, I went to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary to look up “person,” just to make sure I had a complete understanding of the word. Well, apparently I did not. Definition number 6 says: “One (as a human being, a partnership, or a corporation) that is recognized by law as the subject of rights and duties.” It’s like that square/rectangle thing: A human being is a person but a person is not necessarily a human being. Similarly, I suppose, a corporation is a person, but a person is not necessarily a corporation. Or something like that.
From there, wondering how that might apply in what I had thitherto considered a person-vs.-person crime, I looked up the legal definition of murder, which, it turns out, is “the unlawful killing of another human being without justification or excuse.”
So, purely from a semantic point of view, it would not be murder for a corporation to kill a human being because, according to law, murder is the unlawful killing of “another” human being. A corporation is not a human being, despite being a person, so, yes, it can indeed get away with murder. But I guess we all knew that already.
This somehow led me to sociopaths, or people--persons--with “antisocial personality disorder.” (More “a human being is a person but a person is not necessarily a human being” stuff to follow). A sociopath (a subset of ASPD, the other subset being psychopath, I think) essentially is a “person” with no conscience. That is probably oversimplifying, but I’m pretty good at that (when I’m not overcomplicating things).
Which led me to, “It’s not personal, it’s business.” Remember that? It’s from “The Godfather,” but probably more widely known from the movie, “You’ve Got Mail,” wherein it was quoted.
A corporation lacks conscience--”it’s not personal”--despite the fact that a corporation is a person. Therefore, if indeed it IS a person, a corporation is by definition a sociopath, and probably a psychopath as well, although I didn’t delve that deeply into the distinction between the two.
Which means that we’re all working--those of us fortunate enough to be working at all, that is--for the equivalent of Ted Bundy.
Isn’t that just sooooo cool!
More on this vein later, maybe, but right now I have a large cat in my lap who is complicating even something so simple as reaching the keyboard, plus I owe him some attention (according to him).
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