@breadandcircuses @cristinah

Corporations do commonly use their power to magnify the speech of individuals that control them. See my essay Employers of Religion, the third in a three-part series that beings with Corporations Are Not People
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2013/12/corporations-are-not-people.html

NOTE: Google has recently marked part 3 as violating its terms of service. I am at a loss for knowing why, but my best guess is that this is political suppression of speech about corporations. There is nothing I know to be offensive in this article, though it does seek to deny alleged "freedom of religion" to corporations per se, and maybe someone has twisted that into some sense of my writings being intolerant, when in fact I am fussing about corporations doing that.

Make your own decision about whether to proceed past Google's warning, but this post existed for many years in public without anyone citing a problem:
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2013/12/employers-of-religion.html
I've included the most important quote as an image on this post, though, in case you're feeling shy.

#corporations #capitalism #LegalPersonhood #LegalPerson #LegalPeople #rights

@tarmoamer @jackofalltrades @Nonya_Bidniss @MarkBrigham @breadandcircuses

I'm not an "-ism"-ist. If anything, I'm a hybridist -- right tool for right job. But my point is I am not saying any of this to advocate some specific system over some other. I am instead observing that to have any coherent discussion, we must speak honestly about what we're up against. Even systems we like have flaws we should be honest about, and Capitalism certainly has flaws. It matters to know them so one can at least understand what even might be a fix or improvement.

Maybe the right solution is to replace it, but you'd want to know what you were replacing it with. And honestly, I don't think there is enough time left in the history of humanity (which is about to be wiped out by climate change). So we have the system we have.

We CAN regulate it, for example. (That's assuming, of course, we can get our political representatives to care, which is a problem for another day.)

I seem to recall Adam Smith saying this we the solution. He wasn't talking about capitalism but I think maybe employment law. I saw the quote but didn't mark it and have had trouble finding it. But I recall it was a suggestion that if you wanted morality in capitalism, it had to be encoded in law, and that if capitalists were left to their own devices they would likely turn to tyranny. So a well-regulated capitalism is one approach.

But ALSO, stakeholder capitalism is a variant that we had and worked better. Everything went to pieces when we converted to shareholder capitalism. Clyde Prestowitz tells the story of this in quotations I capture in my essay Losing the War in a Quiet Room.
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2019/09/losing-ground-in-environment.html
Interestingly, Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine also traced the modern downward slide to the same place, the actions of Milton Friedman in the 1970's. I tend to believe this account, even though some have traced other influences to earlier (and not without good reason).

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both had proposals for returning to Stakeholder theory during the run-up to the 2020 election, and the notion of Stakeholder capitalism seems like, while it wouldn't fix everything, would be a big incremental improvement. It would make the Fiduciary Duty standard more flexible.

Right now you can do that for B-corps, but the bug is that you can't make the competitors of the B-corp do the same, so you're just putting yourself at disadvantage. People suggest that somehow a well-meaning B-corp has a market advantage, but that's not credible with me. If it had market advantage, all corps would do it anyway, and they don't. In my mind, B-corps are a license to lose money for the sake of being honorable without getting their principals sued. Others would surely characterize them differently.

Some sort of solution that involves an achievable rules change without overturning our basic systems seems like the approach I'd focus on if only for tactical reasons. We can talk forever about a world in which we did things entirely differently, but I just don't see how we get there. Climate Change will extinguish us long before that.

Bernie Sanders: Corporate Accountability and Democracy
https://berniesanders.com/issues/corporate-accountability-and-democracy/

Elizabeth Warren: Accountable Capitalism Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accountable_Capitalism_Act

#capitalism #ShareholderCapitalism #StakeholderCapitalism #LegalPersonhood #LegalPerson #LegalPeople #conscience #ethics #morality #BernieSanders #ElizabethWarren

@alter_kaker @breadandcircuses Regarding the metaphor of sociopathy, I'm using it because it specifically is associated with lack of conscience. I have no mental health credential, so my use is purely descriptive from a lay point of view.

I don't by using this term mean to suggest per se irrationality (an inability to reason) as might come with some actual mental disorders. We're speaking metaphorically here, and metaphors are not literal equivalences. But rather I mean the kind of reckless indifference and appearance of actual cruelty that results in a weirdly logical way if you steadfastly fail (or refuse) to consider moral questions.

This is an artifact particularly of shareholder capitalism. Stakeholder capitalism is better. See my essay Losing the War in a Quiet Room.
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2019/09/losing-ground-in-environment.html

#capitalism #ShareholderCapitalism #StakeholderCapitalism #LegalPersonhood #LegalPerson #LegalPeople #conscience #ethics #morality

@go_shrumm @apublicimage @Pampa @philosophy

Well, I think it's not a moral agent, if I understand your use of the term, but a mirror. We see ourselves in the mirrors and think "look, another intelligent being lives there".

I'm reminded of a conversation with someone where they said (quotes are paraphrases from memory here), "You know how I know there's a God? I look at my cat's eye, the meticulous beauty of its design, and I know there's a God." To which I replied, "Huh. When I look at the beauty of a cat's eye's design, I think: Wow, a billion years is a long time." It's hard to perceive giant numbers sometimes except by effect.

We didn't grow up with these and they are legitimately alien in nature, so we struggle to pick a good metaphor. And metaphors aren't equivalences. They only have some parts that correspond. We owe caution.

You and I read books in school. A few dozen? Some people maybe a hundred or two. They give us breadth of ideas from which to draw. But they are not what makes us sentient. ChatGPT and its ilk have seen myriad books. Enough to make our breadth seem narrow. Far more than we could imagine. Such a tech can synthesize from all that text very elaborate answers, even without deep understanding. Just from examples. Answers that for us seem elaborate but for it may be rote recombination. But is that sentience? I don't see it.

It "reads" all sort of sources. Chat forums where people are sometimes nice, sometimes not. So no wonder it melts down sometimes. That's what it sees people doing. We imagine it is itself upset but it has seen many meltdowns and may be just parroting. That seems most lilely.

Emotion? Or just a mirror. Ocham's razor says pick the simplest explanation. It's hard to see something computationally vast as simple, but it's far simpler than assuming sentience, and it still fits the facts.

One day maybe it'll be smart and sensitive but I think not yet. Then maybe we'll need to care. For now I see the moral question not as feelings of a program but lack of feelings in humans who will more prefer to employ a program than a person, to save money, and so will lay many off.

Society is becoming ever more automated by people who see salaries they pay as drains on profit instead of as human beings to help thrive. They are trending toward employee-free companies. THAT moral question isn't theoretical. It's crisp and real. What of people? Where does income comecfrom in such a society? One where humans have no purpose?

Corporatiions are the first AI. We can see inside to the processor they run on: people. The instruction set, the set of commands you can give this computer is arbitrary, because the processor is itself intelligent. We know the instructions are vague, but they are there: make money for stockholders. The rest is intelligent behavior distinct from it's parts. Philosophers call it the Chinese room problem.

And we worry about the "feelings" of these "legal people" at our peril. They are sociopaths, concerned only with themselves. They do things, require things of their employees, that often none of those people would see as moral.

But these corporations, even though designated legally as such, are not people. They experience no pain. They don't need free speech or freedom of religion. They are just piggy-backing on intelligence in ways we give too much credence, amplifying and distorting the desires of others into proportions that awe us and make us forget the truth and lose perspective.

Some find it fun to contemplate grand things like new intelligence or sentience of these mammoth endeavors. It's a euphoria that captures our imagination and excites us. But it distracts from our collective responsibility to be safe, to keep our fellow people safe, as meanwhile real intelligences, people with real feelings, suffer.

#AI #Corporations #LegalPeople #LegalPerson #LegalPersonhood #Ethics #Morality #ChineseRoom #Philosophy #Sentience #Empathy #Society #Employment #Intelligence #ChatGPT #OpenAI #Metaphor

Further reading from me:

Corporations Are Not People
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2013/12/corporations-are-not-people.html

Fiduciary Duty vs The Three Laws of Robotics
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2009/02/fiduciary-duty-vs-three-laws-of-robotics.html

I wonder if the only reason people keep insisting that #AI will never be #conscious or #sentient (even though we can barely define those terms) is so that they never have to entertain the possibility that this current crop of free labor might actually be legal persons entitled to rights and dignities.

#ethics #rights #HumanRights #LegalPersonhood #animism

@davidstirrup

Just for fun, since I think people with strong opinions on legal personhood would enjoy it, here's an excerpt from that last essay:

"If corporations were people, taking money out of them would be called robbery, not profit or dividends. Owners would surely justify this robbery by saying the corporation was a dependent body, but we would see quickly enough that it was the owner that was dependent on the corporation, not vice versa.

"If corporations were people, other people could not buy, sell, trade or own them. We don't let people own people in the US. We call that slavery. Every person controls his own destiny."

http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2013/12/corporations-are-not-people.html

#politics #capitalism #profit #LegalPersonhood #corporations #business #philosophy #ethics

@davidstirrup

I should add that I wholeheartedly agree with you about excessive profits. They serve short term gain but rob companies of long-term potential for not only profit but just plain sustainability.

Stakeholder theory would help with this a bit because it could prioritize the company as a stakeholder.

But this also overlaps interestingly with the issue of legal personhood. It's not a concept I support, of course. But in my attempt to write a thorough critique of it, one issue that came up which I think is under-appreciated is how like slavery it is (a person owning another albeit-legal person) and in that regard every bit of profit-taking is like theft. So if people really want companies to be legal people, they shouldn't be taking profits at all.

I have a three-part series of essays on that which begins with
"Corporations Are Not People"
http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2013/12/corporations-are-not-people.html

#politics #capitalism #profit #LegalPersonhood #corporations #business

#lawmastodon #University #law #animallaw
It seems it's time for #intros. I'm Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Helsinki. I work mainly in legal philosophy and animal law. I've published especially on legal personhood.

I tweet... (wait... toot?) mainly in English and Finnish.

#legalperson #animallaw #legalpersonhood #jurisprudence #legalphilosophy #introductions