Legal agency does not require subjective intention or a human body

Evidence

Moderns tend to think of responsibility for something as being founded on a relation between an act and the law that defines the penalty attaching to its performance or nonperformance. Intention (in the sense of being a subjective cause) may have nothing to do with the matter, as when someone sustains an injury on another’s property because of an accident. Agents need not necessarily coincide with individual biological bodies and the consciousness that is said to go with them. Corporations are both liable under the law and have the power to carry out particular tasks. But the projects of a corporation are distinguished from the intentions of the individuals who work for it and act in its name. Because “corporations never die,” they can be described as agents but not as having subjectivity. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 358

Categorization

• DEFINE: Asad disambiguates modern legal ‘agency’ (act-and-penalty liability, corporations as agents without subjectivity) from the self-owning intentional subject he will contrast with religious forms of agency.
• XREF: Connects to Cooper’s argument that legal forms presume a particular liberal subject; also echoes how corporate personhood obscures moral responsibility. — connects to: Law that is non-arbitrary does not make citizens unfree — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 66