[lamontcg]

> Companies are totally allowed to have no conscience

I don't think companies are going to form a conscience any time soon.

We need to deal with the fact that they're best viewed as being inherently sociopathic and regulate them effectively.

[Gormo]

Perhaps a better alternative would be to stop anthropomorphising abstractions, and not try to weirdly attribute intentionality, independent agency, or sociopathy to the same thing we're acknowledging is incapable of conscience because it isn't a person.

Corporations are organizational models employed by humans in pursuit of human motivations. They are not entities unto themselves. Everything is humans, all the way down.

[letsdothisagain]

Corporate personhood means that legally they are. If we stripped that away and let the board of governors go to jail for doing blatantly illegal stuff, then they might stop being sociopathic.

I'd also like a pony.

[Gormo]

Corporate officers who commit criminal violations in the conduct of their job are already legally liable for their behavior. The corporation they work for might also incur liability under the law of agency and vicarious liability.

Corporate personhood applies primarily to private law -- contract liability, civil torts, financial obligations and the like.

[int_19h]

No, they'd still be sociopathic. They'd do the absolute minimum they have to do under the law, and no more than that - exactly as a sociopath would if watched by someone with the ability to hurt them.

Conscience is fundamentally a trait that requires some kind of physical personhood - an actual self-identity with empathy attached to it. Corporations, being pure legal fiction, have neither.

This is why it is imperative to keep them as small and toothless as we possibly can as a society, even beyond issues with monopolies.

[dpkonofa]

But in the case of the boards being mentioned, the sociopathy is combined with competition between members that doesn't exist right now. If one board member suggests doing something that would be negatively viewed but another doesn't, they are then competing with each other for the direction of the company as opposed to working together to do whatever sociopathic things serves both their best interests.

Sociopathy is all about driving the interests of the individual. Boards not being liable for the actions of companies allows those interests to always be aligned. Taking that away would require them to think about what's good for the business but also what's good for themselves and those things won't always align for all board members the way they do now.

[int_19h]

I wasn't referring to board members being sociopathic as people, but to the whole entity being sociopathic as a whole. That is generally the case for any organization in direct proportion to its size, even if none of the constituent members are sociopaths.

The problem is that the more people you have working together on something, the less you can rely on informal human interactions to keep things running, and the more written rules and rigid processes you need. Those written rules and rigid processes increasingly take out human factors (such as empathy) out of the equation, and the result is that the entity as a whole behaves in an increasingly sociopathic manner even when its goals (as set by e.g. the board) are ostensibly beneficial.

[Gormo]

> Conscience is fundamentally a trait that requires some kind of physical personhood - an actual self-identity with empathy attached to it. Corporations, being pure legal fiction, have neither.

And, for the same reason, they have no capacity for autonomous thought and action. Corporations are just organizational models for coordinating human activity, but all of the agency still originates with individuals, because there's nothing else that it could originate with.

All malicious acts you are attributing to corporations actually originate from the malicious intent of individuals who are merely using the corporation as an organizational model.

> This is why it is imperative to keep them as small and toothless as we possibly can as a society, even beyond issues with monopolies.

Keeping organized forms of social coordination "small and toothless" is inherently antagonistic to the concept of society itself -- the proper solution is to constrain malicious behavior without interfering with non-malicious behavior, regardless of how that behavior is coordinated or formalized.

There's also a paradox here, in that I have not seen any mechanism proposed for combating the implicit sociopath of one kind of organization that doesn't rely on creating even greater concentrations of monopoly power in the hands of an essentially equivalent form of organization.