Pros & Cons of Corporate Personhood for Transbemans
Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D.
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On the other hand, if Victor Frankenstein did what was described in the Shelley novel, he would be liable. In a litigious society, rather different from the ones of a few hundred years ago, he would have personal liability for the damage and he may even be subject to a wrongful parenting suit by the monster himself.
This slide is one of Lieutenant Data [1], and the question is, should Lieutenant Data be allowed to vote? It's a very different question here because I think most people have warm and fuzzy thoughts about Lieutenant Data and maybe the world would be better if all of us had more Data in us. But if Data was a corporate person, like if FrankenCorp was a corporate person, he would not be allowed to vote because corporations are not allowed to vote. Even some of the most rabid proponents of corporate personhood have not taken it to number ten on the pain scale that voting would entail. If Lieutenant Data lacked corporate personhood but had some natural or juridical personhood, yes, he could be allowed to vote.
An advantage of corporate personhood is it provides a single point of accountability. If that entity does something wrong you can sue them, you can impose criminal sanctions on them, you can dismember the corporation, and take away its charter, effectively killing it.
A disadvantage of corporate personhood is humans can be quite reckless when they get into groupings. We see many instances where corporations do things that individuals would not do because the individuals are protected behind the corporate veil [2], as it's called.
How about a happy society? An advantage of corporate personhood is that when humans group together they can make much greater contributions to human welfare than individuals can alone. I mentioned that no one individual would probably want to start a Harvard University or any college, but grouped together with a corporation as their common objective, they do that. It’s the same with many other types of companies.
A disadvantage from the standpoint of a happy society of corporate personhood is that we individual humans can feel trounced by heartless corporations. When we have to go up against a corporation, if we suffered from a defective product that has caused cancer to us, or to our family, we can feel outnumbered, outweighed and just helpless compared to the corporate might. Why did they have the right to do that?
An evolving society has to do what evolving creatures do under Darwinian processes, which is we have to mutate. Only by changing do we have an increased likelihood that one of our permutations is going to be successful in a changed environment. So the liability protection of corporate personhood urges the risk taking that is very much helpful to an evolving society. On the other hand, the interest of corporations are not the same as the interest of species. Corporations are mostly attending to their shareholders. Their shareholders are looking for results on a scale of a few months, maybe a year or two. Whereas, the species needs to think a lot longer than that. Of course, that's a general statement. You could have smaller corporations that think over a long term. The point is there is no simple answer if corporate personhood is good or bad; it has positives aspects, it has negative aspects. That's something to keep in mind as we apply it to transbemans.
In applying the pros and cons of corporate personhood to transbemans there are also different perspectives we can take. We can take the societal perspective or we can take the perspective from BINA48 [3].
From a societal perspective, a secure society might like there to be corporate personhood for transbemans because there would be more focused controls on the transbeman. Right now the judge doesn't know what to do with BINA48 because she's a quasi person entity. That's just a name for -- I don't know what she is. If there was corporate personhood there would be more of a focus for control and that you could sue and you can post sanctions on this individual. It would be BINA48, herself, who would know that she had a scope of rights and responsibilities beyond which there would be sanctions.
A disadvantage of corporate personhood for transbemans is that creators can escape liability. There is a lot of fear expressed here about what BINA48 might do. If she was under the umbrella of a corporate personhood, the creators of her could feel that they could escape liability and instead push the risk element envelope to the max.
From a happy society standpoint I think Sebastian Sethe put his finger on the issue that the court's decision, in which BINA48 does not have the natural rights of a human, is likely to create a very unhappy transbeman. And unhappy transbemans would be like any unhappy members of society - likely to agitate. Ever since the time of Francis Bacon [4] when he warned the King “you better share the wealth if you want to stay in power,” people have realized that oppression basically is a prescription for one's own doom and demolition. An advantage with giving corporate personhood to a transbeman is that it would be less likely to be angry because it would at least have a certain sphere of rights within which it could own property, it could move about, and it could enjoy a life.
A disadvantage is that it might help nonhumans become dominant, and this was a fear that we saw expressed by the experts. What might BINA48 do to us? She is smarter than us. She might take up all of the computers and the electronic power in the world, and pursue an abstract mathematical problem. If she had corporate personhood it would be a little bit easier to do that. She would have a corporate shell from which to engage her merger and acquisition activity.
Footnotes
1. Lieutenant Commander Data, played by actor Brent Spiner, is a robotic character in the Star Trek fictional universe.
http://www.startrek.com/... October 8, 2008 11:02AM EST
2. Corporate veil - PIERCING THE CORPORATE VEIL - A legal concept through which a corporation’s shareholders, who generally are shielded from liability for the corporation's activities, can be held responsible for certain actions.
http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/p047.htm October 8, 2008 11:38AM EST
3. BINA48 - An advanced computer (Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture, 48 exaflops per second processing speed and 480 exabytes of memory; exa = 10 to the 18th power), also known as "the Intelligent Computer".
http://www.terasemcentral.org/TL/BINA48trial.html October 8, 2008 1:51PM EST
4. Sir Francis Bacon - (later Lord Verulam and the Viscount St. Albans) was an English lawyer, statesman, essayist, historian, intellectual reformer, philosopher, and champion of modern science.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/b/bacon.htm October 8, 2008 1:59PM EST
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