Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wat10000 24 days ago
The question is, why did they bother to take it to court instead of just transferring ownership directly to their persons and then voting as humans? If corporations are just proxies then why bother with the lawyers and the court fees and the time?
1 comments
rayiner 24 days ago
Because they want the other benefits of the corporate form. Why should they have to choose between the benefits of the corporate structure and exercising the rights the municipality has given property owners?
link
ceejayoz 24 days ago
> Why should they have to choose between the benefits of the corporate structure and exercising the rights the municipality has given property owners?

Why shouldn't they?

They're trading one benefit for another.

The individual house owners don't get all the benefits of an LLC for similar reasons.

link
rayiner 24 days ago
> They're trading one benefit for another

Why? What’s the logical basis for this idea that they should have to choose between these benefits?

link
ceejayoz 24 days ago
What's the logical basis for this idea that LLCs should have more benefits than an individual homeowner but give up nothing in return?
link
EnergyAmy 24 days ago
Because corporations aren't people. Full stop.
link
bit-anarchist 24 days ago
To the extent that is relevant to law and ethics, they are. Juridical people, as it goes.
link
EnergyAmy 23 days ago
They're not, and the terminology shouldn't be confused. "Juridical people" tries to sneak in priors about what "people" means.

People, of course, have rights. Corporations are not people, including "juridical people". They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights. Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people.

link
bit-anarchist 23 days ago
You have it backwards. As you acknowledged elsewhere, "juridical people" is an abstraction over a group of people. To be more precise, a collective acting towards a unified goal (with a set of norms binding them together).

Even the naive perspective over this recognizes that the corporation has "rights" by being proxies of their constituents, so you are correct in saying "Every action they take is permission granted to them by the people."

However, a more careful analysis recognizes that the exercised rights of a corp comes from a combination of the rights of its members, often in intermingled way (due to binding norms of the corp) that doesn't map directly into a singular individual. As such, it's common to abstract it as the "rights of the corporation". You can look at the individual rights (sometimes you have to), but that's like looking at humans by their individual cells. Certainly doable, but cumbersome most of the time.

Also, I find the phrase "They are legal fiction with absolutely no rights" funny. As if rights weren't legal fiction themselves. Not that this means much either, ethics and law are about "what ought to be done", and that's - objectively - as fictional as you can get.

link
EnergyAmy 23 days ago
You're confusing them again, which is why sneaking in priors with the term "people" is bad. "granted to them by the people" means "We The People", society, etc, not the people in control of the legal fiction.

> being proxies of their constituents

These proxies have no rights. People can exercise their rights as people. Or, they can create legal fictions with no rights. That legal fiction inherits no rights from the owners, which is where the analogy fails. There's no intermingling/combination/whatever to call "rights", because there's nothing.

Every action that legal fiction takes is a permission granted to it by society that continues to tolerate its existence. That tolerance is finite. When that tolerance ends, so does the legal fiction's existence. Unlike with people, there are no moral quandaries with revoking the privilege of existence.

Rights being inherent to people is an interesting but separate topic. We've generally agreed as a society that people have rights.

link
wat10000 23 days ago
Hold up. Law, OK, partially. But ethics? What ethical framework treats corporations as people?
link
bit-anarchist 23 days ago
The one that backs the law, for instance. But, more broadly, corporations, specially ones ruled by shareholders/contracts, tend to have a will of their own, and "people" in ethics is more about will and desire than biology.
link
EnergyAmy 23 days ago
It's a dangerous game to anthropomorphize legal fictions by using terms like attributing "will" to them. Likewise by sneaking in priors with the term "people". It's best to stick to calling them legal fiction.

It might help to picture them as literally a piece of paper. It would be pretty silly to say that piece of paper has a "will of its own" or "rights" or calling it a "person", wouldn't it?

If I scribble "i am a person" on a piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. If I get a bunch of people to join in and scribble something on the same piece of paper, it's still just a piece of paper. There's no confusion over "rights" or "will". It's a piece of paper.

link
wat10000 23 days ago
What is "the one that backs the law"?

I don't buy it at all. For example, it's generally considered to be unethical to kill a person aside from limited circumstances such as self defense. Killing a person because they're no longer useful to you is Right Out in every ethical framework I've ever heard of. Are you implying that dissolving a corporation is unethical?

link