Philosophy 101 Unit 1

This question has arisen many many times in relation to economics, and I think it parallels a lot of what we’ve discussed on what makes up being.  The question from an ecomic perspective, is “Does a corporate body qualify as a person, and should it be subject to the same freedoms, responsibilities, etc. etc. as a person?”

The reason for bringing up this question here is because I think that a machine and a corporation bear many great similarities–both are ‘designed’ entities.  While I know this is a far stretch scenario for now, I do think we need to consider these questions.

In the case that machines do reach a point where they can pass the Turing game, and they do, at the very least, emulate humanity; should we not grant them the same rights and responsibilities as a human?

This, then, raises the question of whether we should grant ‘personhood’ to so-called ‘artifacts,’ which, I would argue, also include corporate bodies.  To be honest, my initial inclination is to say that machines possessing primarily humanistic qualities should be treated as equal to human in the eyes of the law and society, while corporate bodies should not be allowed such priviledge.  However, I cannot seem to clearly articulate my reasoning as to why, as it seems that it would only make sense to allow a corporate body, if it proves it carries humanistic traits, the priviledge of ‘personhood’.

I suppose scale does play hell with this scenario, as a corporation is capable of reach beyond the scope of a single person or machine, however, it doesn’t seem ‘fair’ to impose a regulation based on such an analog, and imprecise distinction.

Here’s a scenario to play with:

Let us consider the legal case of a charge of manslaughter.  For the case of the robot, a single (or maybe a few) people are accidentally killed during its routine operation.  If we are to consider the machine to be autonomous, and self running, the machine must meet justice for what has happened, regardless of intent.  Simply imprisoning a machine will do little to ‘punish’ it, and nor will it ‘fix’ the problem. How should this case proceed?

As a parallel case, let us consider a corporation which inadvertently causes the deaths of a few tens or hundreds of people (to compensate for scale of existence).  In this case, the corporate body, if treated as a person, must be held accountable for what has happened.  However, much like a machine, we cannot expect to incarcerate a corporate body.  Again, how should this case proceed, and how would it compare to the proceedings in a human case and to a robot case?

Granted, these questions seem to bring our legal structure and proceedings into question more than the comparison of machine, corporation, and person; but I do still think this is an apt place to begin discussion.