Criminal and Civil liability are the two topics to focus on - you will find that non-human entities have very limited categories of crimes that apply to them. This is a key topic in the emergence of 'seemingly conscious' or 'seemingly unitary' AGI compute entities.
Also worth noting that Common Law tends to be the primary mode of law globally, even in counties that are nominally Code Napoleon (aka Civil Law) countries.
But I think the boring answer here is that we sometimes need legal abstractions. If they don't exist, Microsoft is no longer a distinct entity; it's 200,000 people who for some reason talk to each other, and you can't really audit their finances, punish them collectively, or set any ground rules that apply specifically to their joint activities.
This obviously has negative externalities, because while a corporation is easy to fine, it's hard to put in prison... but trying to approach it differently would be about as fun as modeling a CPU as a bunch of transistors.
Unexpected indeed, interesting!
Historically and practically speaking, I get the impression that the boat stuff seems the least controversial and makes the most sense. Incoherent to want to sue a river for flooding, but if a boat crashes into your house for example, then you'd like to be able to at least seize the boat without enduring the back-and-forth deflection between owners and operators.
I would have thought that people who hate the idea of corporate personhood would also hate the idea of any other kind of non-person personhood.
Why do you think this would be the case? I agree with the former but not the latter.
The more logical reason is that if corporate personhood sucks and we have it anyway, then like it or not, now we need to extend it elsewhere just to level the playing field. If anti-environmental interests can hide behind it as a justification that makes their fight easier then let the environmental interests do the same thing.
This isn't usually what people are objecting to when they object to corporate personhood. Their objection is to treating them like natural persons. The article makes that distinction at the end with the example of Lord Rama, who is not a natural person legally, and so doesn't have constitutional rights.
In the United States in particular the courts have held that the collective group speech of a corporation is protected as 1st amendment speech, because all the individual members have free speech rights as natural persons. I think this is a basic error. (To use the Indian deity personhood analogy: all of Rama's devotees are natural persons, therefore if you censor Rama, you censor his followers, who are natural persons and so have free speech. Non sequitur.)
Three replies now, all saying that this is nonsense (including this one). I would venture to say it's the other way around: if you are okay with a river having 'personhood' then that logically leads to being okay with a group of people having 'personhood'.
Elephants, on the other hand, have a better case for 'personhood' than a river. An elephant has autonomy, is thinking, can feel pain, has emotions... a river has none of these things, nor does a corporation (even if the parts {humans} consisting of a corporation do).
The two types of persons do not have the same rights and obligations and they can not commit the same crimes.
But not to be conflated with rovers or wanderers!
It seems like there are judges in the US who are sympathetic to the argument that elephants are clearly persons with consciousness, desires, suffering, etc. but that the ramifications of declaring them as such would be too chaotic.
One day.
[0]: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/03/10/what-we-owe-our-...
Really? Businesses can be legal entities, not people. Just like how a nation can be for people, but it is more than people themselves.
viciousvoxel•25m ago