Corporate personhood is the belief that corporations have some rights similar to those granted to humans. This, on the surface, seems like a matter of fairness towards companies. It allows companies the right to freedom of speech, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and protection against excessive fines among others. These rules seem necessary in order to ensure protection of corporations.
However, there is a point at which a line has to be drawn. One of the biggest controversies regarding this is the idea that corporation can have a religion and they may make decisions based on a religion. This gives theoretically an open door for companies to break the law. They just have to claim that it was done on the basis of religion. At the same time, how can a corporation have a religion when a corporation is a conglomerate of individuals that may or may not share that religion? Who decides this religion? Is it the founder of the company, the board of directors, the CEO, or is it a voting process?
Furthermore, if a company can have a religion, they can certainly have a political party. This allows companies, which have an incredible amount of resources, to invest their money on funding for their political parties. Individuals can hardly compete with the power these companies have, making politics a competition of which companies invested the most money. This became a problem with the removal of a law that previously capped the amount of money corporations could invest for campaigning of a candidate.
Finally, another problem is that corporations, unlike humans, can’t go to jail. They can be fined and eventually forced to disappear, but this sort of arrangement gives too much power to corporations. There have been cases where companies prefer to pay for fines because violating the laws gives them more money than the fines they have to pay. Ultimately, this gives them a way to freely keep breaking the law.
At a deeper level, is the matter of ethical responsibility. There have been many cases where companies engaged in immoral acts. How should they be accountable for that? One relevant example is that of IBM. During WWII, machines built by IBM played a vital role in organizing the various stages of the holocaust process. Finding millions of people belonging to a religion or a race, extracting all of their property, transporting them to concentration camps, and scheduling their distribution to be used for experiments, labor, or death was a massive undertaking that would simply not be possible with a pen and paper. This was possible thanks to the large number of tabulating machines that IBM sold and serviced for the Nazi government.
Certainly, individuals who colluded with the Nazi government were held responsible for their actions, but IBM certainly didn’t. Perhaps the problem was that back then no one questioned the claim that the German branch of the company was taken over by the Nazis. The problem now, however, is that unlike individuals, corporations are everchanging bodies of people. It doesn’t make sense to punish them now when essentially all their work-force has been replaced. Most certainly everyone who works for IBM now had nothing to do with the support of the holocaust carried out by the company many decades prior.
Certainly, IBM helping the Nazi government carry out their genocide was an act punishable by law, but it is no longer correct to punish them. What this shows is that ultimately corporations are unlike humans. Thus, the law should not treat them as such. A new set of laws that applies only to corporations should be created. This should be a set of laws the holds corporations accountable in their own realm. This should be with the purpose of preventing immoral actions while protecting people that may not be involved in the actions of the corporation.
The judging for morality for corporations won’t be too different from the way we judge humans. If a corporation does anything that would be immoral for a human to do, it is immortal for them too. The only different lies in how the cases are handled.