England legalized limited liability despite recognizing it subverted moral responsibility

Evidence

Compare this picture with the beginning and rise of the concept and practice of limited liability in modernity, to be found nowhere other than in England and at no other time than during its initial imperialist and colonialist ventures (roughly around 1600). In spite of the fact that the early modern British government recognized the moral repugnancy of the limited-liability company shortly after Parliament approved it, and although it had outlawed it on the grounds that it subverted personal moral responsibility by allowing investors to absolve themselves of any liability for their companies going bankrupt (just as the Shariʿa’s logic of the benchmark operated, but without wavering), Parliament, a few years later, nonetheless went back on its own previous decision and legalized it again, only this time the reenactment came with an enhanced juristic personality, the very quality that initially outraged the government’s moral sense. Apparently, the British government’s ethical benchmark was uncertain, to say the least, and differed in significant ways from what I have just called Shariʿa’s persistent moral benchmark. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 158

Categorization

• CANDY: Britain first outlawed the limited-liability company on explicitly moral grounds, then re-legalized it anyway — a tidy anecdote about profit beating principle.
• XREF: Ties to colonial-empire histories and the ‘corporate personhood’ debates in contemporary law.