Dewey defined legal personhood pragmatically by its social consequences.

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. “There are some things, bodies singular and corporate, which clearly act differently, or have different consequences, depending upon whether or not they possess rights and duties, and according to what specific rights they possess and what obligations are placed upon them.” — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 383

Categorization

• DEFINE: Dewey’s anti-ontological, consequences-based definition of corporate personhood.