Corporations and Orangutans

You don’t expect an interesting analysis of a major public policy issue in a humor column, particularly one by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post Magazine, a master of the art of real silliness.  Imagine the surprise to find his analysis of the “Hobby-Lobby” Supreme Court decision both hilarious and thought- provoking.  He first pointed out the obvious that the decision was based on assuming the personhood of a corporation, then went on to the silly conclusion that it would expedite the normalization of same-sex marriage.  But along the way it was a fascinating skim over the slippery slope of personhood.  For example, given the constitutional prohibition against slavery, can one own shares in a “person”? Is there a minimum age for participation in the election process as there is for human “persons”? Is the merger of two corporations a form of marriage?  Is a hostile takeover equivalent to rape? Does a corporation have gender?  All good silliness which points to the problem of how one declares a corporation to be a person without being able to define what a “person” is in the first place.

That’s one of the big unappreciated problems of our century.  Corporations are far from the only issue. Robotics is racing ahead toward the development of an intelligent, autonomous humaniform robot? Would owning one constitute slavery? Should it be able to vote? PBS just presented a program on the heart-wrenching story of an orangutan raised like a human child, taught and able to converse in an extensive sign language, coining his own words, treated as a member of the community for many years and then sent back to live in a cage with other orangutans in the zoo for many years. He fell into deep depression which was ameliorated only when his original trainer was able to rescue him.  How close to a person is he, and what happens when a genetically modified “animal” becomes able to behave in even more human ways, as is likely being worked on somewhere now? Anyone who has seen the recent movie “Her” knows the direction in which intelligent software is, perhaps inexorably, evolving.  The traditional Turing Test for intelligent machines, that they be able to converse remotely without the human on the other end of the line being able to tell they are talking to a machine, was officially passed recently, with some controversy, for the first time. We have all inhabited the early space age enough now that we are not shaken with the idea of green-skinned, three-armed space creatures being people. And again, just what is a person anyway? A 19^th century answer just doesn’t work anymore.

Perhaps though, our heritage does provide some partial answers.  When Columbus discovered the new world, there was a long argument in Europe about whether the inhabitants had souls; in today’s terms, about whether they were persons. The conclusion was that they were capable of knowing right from wrong and behaving that way and therefore they were in fact persons. To be sworn in as a witness in court involves presumptions of possessing moral judgment, knowing the difference between truth and falsehood and being willing to act in accordance with that knowledge.  Teenagers are not allowed to vote until they reach an age when some moral judgment can be presumed.  Prisoners incarcerated for some morally heinous crime are not allowed to vote. They are considered to have flunked the morality test. Historically, the “moral being” test seems accepted as the basis for competency in the legal process.  That seems to me also a minimum test for participation in the political process.  Orangutans may or may not meet that test –the evidence is still shaky on that.  Robots could possibly eventually be built with that capability. Corporate advocates argue that for-profit corporations are prohibited from acting morally; their sole obligation is to maximize profits for their shareholders.  By their own advocates’ argument, corporations fail the “moral being” test for personhood.

So, corporations must develop a conscience or not allowed in the political process.  There are other, possibly better reasons for excluding them, but failure to pass the “moral being” test is certainly a start. It could  be applied to politicians, too. Thanks, Gene.