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Declaring corporations "legal persons" does not make them actual persons. Congress has the power to declare automobiles or refrigerators as legal persons if they choose. This would not magically grant those items any form of consciousness or free will. And a slave without free will or consciousness is not a slave.

Some people (apparently including "many philosophers") confuse the constituent parts with the whole. They reason that since a corporation is created by people, and made up (partly) of people, they must share sentience with people. But people participate in many social structures, including dinner parties, marching bands, and mobs, which are not collectively sentient and clearly not "persons" in any meaningful sense. At best, human organizations operate cognitively at the level of insects, and perhaps not even that high up the evolutionary tree.

How would you test if a dinner party was sentient? What evidence would change your mind?
I think the fact that it's difficult to even conceive of how to interact with a dinner party as an entity illustrates the point. It would actually be easier to assess the sentience of an insect. Rather than a person, it makes more sense to think of human organizations as organic colonies, like jellyfish. They have various degrees of structure, and collective behavior that can be observed. They are clearly independent entities in some sense. But there's no evidence of sentience or consciousness on the entity level. Sure, you can get intelligent answers from the CEO, and I think this is what trips people up. The CEO is not the company, merely a component of the company. Same goes for any individual dinner guest.

Perhaps there is some kind of experiment that could be rigged where coded information could be supplied to the dinner party in a manner ensuring that the participants were not aware of it, then the response read out by decoding the resulting activity. And if that yielded some kind of intelligent response indicating self-awareness and self-direction, I could be persuaded. But I would also be persuaded that the moon is made of green cheese if multiple lunar sampling missions came back with green cheese. i don't anticipate either experiment succeeding.

Consider a Chinese room type setup. The organization exists inside and one is able to communicate by passing letters.

This highlights some of our preconceptions about what it means to communicate with an organization. We have a lot of hidden assumptions here. One that I started out having but discarded is that every constituent part of the org inside must contribute to the response. But then I consider myself as a collection of cells and know my foot doesn't exactly contribute to this message. So, equality of contribution is not a salient scissor.

The Chinese room setup just hides the problem behind a facade, it does not solve the problem. Which is that as soon as you communicate to someone in the dinner party that you're running the experiment, it ceases to be a dinner party.

It is certainly true that every constituent part of the colony doesn't need to contribute to any particular action to demonstrate sentience, any more than to demonstrate locomotion. But in the case of humans, an individual human is so clearly sentient and conscious that any experiment would be completely confounded if it involved communicating directly and consciously with any individual human. In your Chinese room, any sentience could just as easily be explained by one of the parties simply communicating directly with the experimenter as it could be by group sentience, and Occam's Razor would apply.

A thing can be a dinner party and an experiment. Awareness of the experiment doesn't erase the dinner party, just as awareness of an experimenter doesn't erase the fact that people are still eating together. Both categories can overlap without contradiction. We do this all the time in our daily lives.

Just the same, I can still be me and participate in an experiment. My identity doesn't collapse into “only subject” when I'm studied, and the same continuity of self applies to someone in the Chinese room. The role doesn't erase the person.

Occam's Razor is a heuristic, not a law. Applied too bluntly, it favors the easiest seeming explanation even when the phenomenon, like consciousness, is exactly the kind where every explanation comes with complexity, making "simplicity" a misleading standard. Occam's razor in social situations biases toward implicit social assumptions that smuggle their way into the conclusion without accounting for their contribution toward complexity.

Finally, why should a person communicating from the Chinese room sometimes be treated as simply themselves and other times as only a mouthpiece of the system? Nothing in the setup changes about who they are or what they're doing. Once we allow that kind of shifting interpretation, any conclusion about group sentience is dead before it begins.

>Finally, why should a person communicating from the Chinese room sometimes be treated as simply themselves and other times as only a mouthpiece of the system?

If one of the participants simply responds to queries from outside the room with their own thoughts, how does that show sentience for the dinner party as a system? No offense, but you are illustrating exactly the confusion I was referring to in my original comment. The tendency is to assume that the whole is as sentient as the parts, and in the case of human organizations, that is not true. I think the short explanation is that the human participation is highly constrained---the members are employing a very small subset of their human potential to play their limited role in the organization. And the communication rate between these "slivers of a human" is much lower than that between the components of a single human mind. So the emergent behavior of the system as a whole is much simpler than the operation of a single human mind.

> I have come to the belief that corporations are persons not only in law, but are persons also in reality. Their legal personalities are only the recognition of real, underlying, group personalities.

The author's (along with "many philosophers'") entire line of argument is argument from analogy. She lists many aspects of corporations that are similar to aspects possessed by humans and then conclude they are the same thing.

The same argument could be made with humans and ducks and it would be just as valid.

The author's view that corporations are actually people is becoming more common not because it is rational, but because it is profitable for corporations to be able to claim various kinds of personal rights.

I think a corporation is as much a person as Voltron is a person.

A person’s constitute components don’t have higher-levels of consciousness, but a person does. Whereas for a corporation, the situation is reversed—the constituent components have higher-level consciousness, but the corporation does not by itself.

I agree with the premise that a corporation then is some kind of slave, or thrall, at the command a committee of wizards. So, a zombie in some sense.

Another similarity to note is that the will and nature of a corporation changes depending on its most influential constituent components, which is similar in nature to how a human person might change due to a disease or different mental state.

By extension, mobs, religions, and most groups of people would be slaves, no?
If we stick with the lens of mythology, where a collective will is embodied by something which controls it, then yes.

We can say some things are more like golems, while others are more like thralls. I think religions are more like golems because a collective will is distilled into a “singular” scripture, and many times the logos is esoteric in nature, but its “magic” gets the job done, that is to say, you don’t need to understand your religion to be religious.

Should we broadly categorize embodiments of collective will as such? Not necessarily—I think democratic institutions are less prone to be slavish, but more like a person with schizophrenia managing themselves. I think the closer an entity gets to a human person-level of embodiment, the more likely it is to be pro-social.

In circles of occult technology, a corporation would simply be understood as an "Egregore". Which is itself might be considered a slave of its constituents, but no more than they are a slave of the collective will.

Am I a slave to my cells? Are my cells a slave of 'me' (whatever 'me' is)?

A slave of its constituents seems an incorrect angle. Like you’d be a slave of your organs. Granted, you can bend definitions (which is the case here, regardless) but the slave of constituents is wrong from a causal model perspective.
I didn't know there were people who took Citizens United literally, but here we are...
That looks like a weird exercise in anti-capitalist rhetoric. More of a performance rather than serious inquiry.
Seemed more like hypercapitalist rhetoric to me. After all, if corporations are literal persons, then you could argue for the worst corpocracy as a "human rights" obligation, without even having to talk about wealth or economics as the usual justification.
If the author argued that it would be hypercapitalist rhetoric, but the author argued for worker cooperatives.
Lots of irrelevant mental gymnastics on the ethics of it. In terms of the idea of emergent behavior, I think this is well understood that companies have this kind of personality. Emergent behavior is also the cornerstone of the invisible hand.

This also extends to things like social networks. For example I think that Twitter the entity convinced Elon Musk to purchase it (so it could evolve as an entity outside of previous constraints it had, see also Wintermute), and doing so was an emergent action.