Content area
Abstract
There are two very important debates currently underway in both the philosophical literature and public discourse: the first is about whether corporations are moral agents, and thus have moral obligations; the second is about whether corporations are persons, and thus entitled to a very specific suite of rights and protections. These conversations have occasionally been conated by critics of corporate moral agency who argue (or assume) that recognizing corporations as moral agents requires us to recognize them as persons, that moral agency entails personhood. This entailment is then treated as a kind of reduction for claims of corporate moral agency: 1. if corporations are moral agents then they must also be persons, 2. if corporations are persons then they are entitled to significant rights and protections, of the kind traditionally reserved for human beings, 3. this is an absurd outcome, and 4. corporations are not moral agents. The primary purpose of this article is to rebut the claim of entailment, demonstrating that even the highly sophisticated moral agency of corporations does not entail the kind of personhood at issue here. This will allow the conversations about moral agency and personhood to proceed separately, as they should, while bringing some welcome clarity to the personhood debate.