Why personhood matters

New York magazine has a really funny cover story/essay this week written by John Homans titled “The Rise of Dog Identity Politics.” In it, Homans uses humor and overall goodnaturedness to soften what is a ultimately a stinging rebuke of contemporary culture and its confusion with something as simple as personhood, both as a practical matter and as a moral category. While we might snicker at Homans’ funny portraits of city folk and the nutty accommodations they make for their canine companions, there are some serious implications for our culture’s inability to make sense out of what makes people people.

One of these implications can be seen in the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision – Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – that reversed precedent and granted corporations, among other entities, greater protection under the First Amendment’s promise of free speech. I have not read the decision and am not a lawyer, so I won’t venture into the territory of legal precedents and practical application, but I would point your attention to the notion that any law or legal decision that obfuscates the line between individual and corporate entities is probably a bad thing.

Appearing on SCOTUSblog, law professor Lawrence Tribe has some interesting things to say about the recent decision. Most pertinent to the discussion here, Tribe writes:

“Talking about a business corporation as merely another way that individuals might choose to organize their association with one another to pursue their common expressive aims is worse than unrealistic; it obscures the very real injustice and distortion entailed in the phenomenon of some people using other people’s money to support candidates they have made no decision to support, or to oppose candidates they have made no decision to oppose.”

While I can’t imagine that I would find myself agreeing with Tribe’s progressivism very often, I believe Tribe is right to point out what seems to be a fairly simple thing – corporations aren’t people and don’t enjoy the same kinds of protections that people do. Of course, the door swings both ways – corporations also don’t labor under the same set of responsibilities as people do, or, as Ambrose Bierce once defined it in his Devil’s Dictionary, a corporation is “[a]n ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.”

You can’t crack open a newspaper without reading stories of corporate malfeasance played out on a large scale, and public anger is at a boiling point with corporations – banks, insurers, ratings agencies, et al. – in the financial industry because of their perceived ability to escape responsibility for the crisis of the past few years. In the past, one could always take some degree of solace in the implicit trade-off of corporations: less responsibility, but fewer political rights. Even folks who otherwise would be anti-corporation could appreciate the utility of the arrangement.

I fear that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, when viewed from a big-picture perspective, has done much to muddy the water concerning individual personhood, as opposed to and distinct from a corporate entity, and perhaps even unwittingly opened corporations up to new kinds of risks. After all, if corporate political speech should be considered on par with individual political speech, one might ask in what other areas should corporate behavior be subject to standards we normally apply only to people.