Convivium Irenicum 2019 Part 5.2

(For Part 5.1 in which I summarize Hugh Whelchel's paper and raise a question go here. For the first in this series of Convivium 2019 posts go here.)

Both Whelchel's biblical-theological account and my Aristotelian one reached a similar conclusion: "Neither individuals nor corporations exist for themselves. Rather we and our tools (including corporations) are called to glorify God in growing His peaceable Kingdom [shalom]."

But: "both of us face a similar objection: Sure, on a Christian account shalom is the goal of human activity but corporations ain't human. So why should an artificial person aim for the same end as a natural one?"

In other words, is a corporation a person or an instrument? Does a corporation have a final cause or is it merely an efficient one? Is the level of the moral licitness of profit measured at the corporate level or that of its shareholders?

The answer is moot for most corporations. Closely held (by an individual or a family) corporations (e.g., Hobby Lobby) or LLC's are morally indistinguishable from their shareholders/members. Most corporations exist only as a means of limiting individual or family liability or other state-created utilitarian ends. Except as reinvested, all profits go to a small group of persons whose use of them must be evaluated in terms of their contributions to shalom. In such cases corporate "personhood" is fully fictional. 

Second, whatever moral status I will argue attaches to publicly-traded corporations is not a legal standard. With all due respect (and notwithstanding its origins eight centuries ago as an instrument of the king's conscience), no one should expect the Delaware Court of Chancery to judge the virtue or vice of corporate profitability.

Finally, I'll start by sending readers here where in another context I argued that

If (since) humans can create moral obligations out of thin air, so to speak, by promising, then so can certain human instrumentalities. Unlike, say, rocks and clouds, corporations are moral agents. They choose ends and means; they exercise agency. Consider the following theological analogy: just as God created human beings in his image (which, whatever else the imago dei entails, includes moral agency) so too humans can create non-biological entities in their image that likewise are moral agents. I suspect most people believe that corporations are moral agents and, although moral intuitions don’t prove much, they should count for something.

But is this true? in other words, can a "person" created by human agents through legislative means itself be a moral agent? Is even characterizing a publicly traded corporation as possessing agency a bridge too far? Not if Nicholas Wolterstorff is correct. You can go here to read my full post "Corporations and Rights (And Duties)" but I'll quote the substance of it below:

Even though corporations are not capable of causal agency, i.e., apart from human agents they can do nothing, corporations nonetheless are capable of rational agency. In other words, a human's acts on behalf of a corporation are those of the corporation and in turn the corporation's agent's acts are counted as that of the corporation, which Wolterstorff calls double agency (p. 364). Quoting from the following page:  

Human persons are living organisms capable of rational agency. Social entities [like corporations] confront us with the curious phenomenon of entities capable of rational agency that are not living organisms. Shall we say that such entities do not have lives, on the ground that they are no living organisms? Or shall we say that they do have lives, on the ground that they are capable of rational agency?

Wolterstorff opts for the later. In the case of corporations, it is the power of the state that confers this sufficient simulacrum of living organisms to enable them to acquire rights. Thus, indirectly, and certainly not without human agency, corporate entities have sufficient non-instrumental worth to ground rights. If rights, then duties of others to respect such rights and, equally importantly, the duty to properly regard the rights of others.

Apropos to the current conversation, if publicly traded corporations are agentic enough to enjoy rights then they are sufficiently persons to commit wrongs. And once that conclusion is admitted, we see that corporations are more than purely instrumental hammers. In other words, such corporations have a final cause that is more than profitability. Derived as they are from humans whose duty it is to seek shalom, such corporations should likewise be morally evaluated on the extent they advance the goal of God's peaceable kingdom.