[yummyfajitas]

In my post, "you" refers to the corporate person that is the Centrelink government agency (and implicitly the humans behind that corporate person), about which false allegations were made.

Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted?

[jbapple]

> Is there some meaningful distinction here that means false allegations about an organization of humans should go unrefuted, but false allegations about a single human should be refuted?

To me, false allegations against individuals are more serious than false allegations against organizations for a few reasons. First, I care about the well-being of organizations only to the extent they positively impact the well-being of humans (or, to a lesser extent, animals). Second, a single false allegation against an individual human seems to be able to have a much more damaging effect than one against an organization.

I suspect this is a well-worn topic and that I would consider many of the other objections to corporate personhood to be "meaningful distinctions".

[yummyfajitas]

In this case, the false allegations were spread with the implicit goal of getting the government to spend more money/resources fixing problems that may not exist. If successful, that would result in a huge amount of waste, which harms real humans.

Even if it were a private organization, such allegations could directly result in harm to the human owners. For example, false allegations about bad food at a restaurant would mean the human owners and employees lose money. In much the same way, false allegations about a human might result in them losing their job.

[jbapple]

While all of these are possible and all of these are bad outcomes, I think that their probability of happening and the magnitude of the result is less bad than what would occur if allegations of cruelty or incompetence were made against an individual.

I don't think we're going to be able to settle this argument here, so I'll just leave it at that.