Corporate personhood is a legal fiction defined by its consequences, not ontology

Evidence

More than a decade after Machen’s arguments about corporate personality, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, in a 1926 article in the Yale Law Journal, pushed some of the implications of prior writings on corporate personhood further, concluding that “for the purposes of law the conception of ‘person’ is a legal conception; put roughly, ‘person’ signifies what law makes it signify.” Instead of the ontological claims of Machen, Dewey accepts an appropriately pragmatist view of personhood: what matters is not that something can be classified as a person while something else cannot but the “social consequences” of ascribing rights and duties to something. … Corporate personhood, for Dewey, is ultimately an incoherent idea without ontological grounding, an idea that can only be grasped through the specific ends that equating corporation and person performs. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 383

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Dewey’s pragmatist theory that corporate personhood is purely a legal construct judged by social consequences, not by any underlying reality.
• XREF: Dewey’s instrumentalist view of personhood connects directly to the reader’s Corpocene framework — legal person status as a tool applied to firms and then to influencers. — connects to: Corporations resist ethical chastisement because they are not human individuals — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 145