Do Corporations Have Rights?

 Posted by on 19 November 2010 at 8:00 am  Law, Objectivist Answers, Politics
Nov 192010
 

The new site Objectivist Answers has really taken off since its launch, now with over 190 questions, more than 400 answers, and countless comments and votes from a steady stream of visitors!

One of the questions is asked by “ryankrause“:

Do Corporations Have Rights?

There has been some controversy lately over the rights of corporations (freedom of speech, etc.). From an Objectivist perspective, what–if any–are the rights of corporations? Do they simply share the individual rights of their shareholders, or since they are technically legal creations, should they have fewer rights than human beings?

Objectivist Answers user JJMcVey offers the following answer:

Leaving aside the issue of their current legal status and dealing with principles, corporations are nothing more than means by which individuals get together and pool resources to make a single integrated system of resources to achieve one common objective. The rights of the corporation are whatever the rights possessed by the individual as they choose to delegate to it, and are of equal validity as any individual rights for that reason.

In regards to limited liability, the principle itself is sound but the law surrounding it today is wrong. The law today says corporations really are separate entities with legal personhood, which law is then used to pretend that incorporation is only a government privilege and that corporations are obliged to serve government ends. The law as it stands then leads to a variety of injustices, which have themselves lead to further bad adjustments to already bad law (another example of controls breeding controls).

If the law were written properly limited liability would be legally recognised for what it actually is: a derivative property right and which gives the superficial appearance of the corporation being a separate entity for the purposes of issuing stock, borrowing money, and similar financial activities. Everything valid about limited liability can be traced back to individuals’ rights to property and freedom of contract, including other derivatives such as the right to freedom of principal-and-agent agreements. Proper law relating to limited liability would just recognise that people would use these same types of contractual arrangements again and again, so would integrate the practice into a few concepts (the corporation and a few variants) and develop an integrated body of law to match. That law would also then not let bad people perpetrate the fraudulent behaviour that law imparting legal-personhood to corporations shields them to do.

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Objectivism, Not Social Darwinism

 Posted by on 4 November 2010 at 7:00 am  Objectivism, Objectivist Answers
Nov 042010
 

The new site Objectivist Answers has really taken off since its launch, now with over 150 questions, more than 300 answers, and countless comments and votes from a steady stream of visitors!

One of the questions is asked by “Bas“:

What is Social Darwinism?

What is Social Darwinism? And why do people mistake laissez-faire or Objectivism for Social Darwinism?

Objectivist Answers user Robert Garmong offers the following answer:

Social Darwinism is a 19th-Century philosophy which applied the concept of “survival of the fittest” to human society. Though there are other variants of social Darwinism (including Nazi-style eugenics), the idea is primarily associated with an argument for laissez-faire capitalism put forth most famously by Herbert Spencer.

The most basic form of social Darwinian “defense” of capitalism argues that mankind, like all other species, evolves by the process of competition for scarce resources. The most “fit” — i.e., the ones best able to gain and utilize natural resources — survive and reproduce, while those less capable eventually die off and are removed from the gene pool. Laissez-faire capitalism allows the fittest (the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the world) to gobble up all the resources and reproduce, while the unfit (such as the handicapped, the mentally retarded, or the lazy) die off and fail to reproduce. Any interference with laissez-faire capitalism (such as social welfare programs or regulations on business) weakens or destroys the gene pool.

This argument, as a form of pure biological determinism, utterly ignores the role of the human mind. While it recognizes the importance of “intelligence,” it holds intelligence as a purely biological, innate attribute. It doesn’t take too much of a sophisticate to see that, if you somehow killed off every lazy person in the current generation, next generation you’d have a whole new crop of them — because laziness is not a product of genetics.

A somewhat more sophisticated version, exemplified by the stories of Horatio Alger, gives notional credence to the mind. It holds that the survival and thriving of the fittest in any field serves as an example, while the failure or death of the unfit serves as a cautionary tale. While significantly better than crude form of social Darwinism, it is still premised on the idea that capitalism requires mass death, and it is still based on the altruistic premise that the purpose of ethics/politics is the betterment of society.

Note that social Darwinism in either form is not properly a defense of capitalism, but a critique of everything else. It doesn’t say that capitalism is moral, or just, or based on objective values, or rooted in unalienable rights. It carries only the grim message that “if you do anything else, the race will die in misery.” (In point of fact, most social Darwinians believe that extinction is inevitable anyway, as human beings will eventually use up all the resources in the environment. Thomas Malthus, though writing before Darwin, made the classic argument for this view which was later absorbed into social Darwinism.)

Although, like Ayn Rand’s ethics, this argument claims to be rooted in biology, it is rooted in precisely those elements of biology that are least-relevant to mankind. As Stellavision noted, human beings do not survive by cutthroat competition for scarce resources. Human beings thrive by productive creation and mutually-beneficial trade of increasingly-abundant values.

Imagine a young man trying to sort out his political opinions, as most people do in their teens and early twenties. On one hand, there is a stern-faced exponent of the view that mankind, while eventually doomed to miserable death, can stave it off for a time only by accepting mass death of the unfit while the fat-cats born with unfair advantages exploit us all and live in opulence. On the other hand, there is a Marxist/socialist who promises a future of solidarity and prosperity for all, if we only expropriate the wealth from the few and distribute it “fairly” to the masses. Is it any wonder that social Darwinism has far more people to reject capitalism than to accept it?

As for the question why people associate Objectivism with social Darwinism, the obvious answer is that those on the Left have taken social Darwinism as the straw man, the most obviously repulsive version of pro-capitalist argument, in order to smear the rest of us.

But what about those who aren’t virulent anti-capitalists, who nonetheless associate Ayn Rand’s ideas with social Darwinism? In most cases, I think it’s due to the surface-level association of the fact that Ayn Rand made heroes of businessmen, and so did social Darwinians. The fact that Ayn Rand’s businessman heroes produced and spread values, not sacrifice and death, is lost on the casual reader.

If you liked that answer, please go vote for it to make it more visible to the world while sending Robert some well-deserved OA “karma.” (And if you think he has missed something important, that’s fine too: you can add a comment to that effect, or contribute a whole new answer of your own!)

Objectivist Answers is an exciting new online resource where anybody can ask questions of Objectivists, and any Objectivist can answer! Please visit with your questions, answers, or both!

Oct 192010
 

The new site Objectivist Answers has really taken off since its launch: it now has over 120 questions, over 230 answers, and countless comments and votes from a steady stream of visitors!

One of the questions is asked by “seehafer“:

Did Ayn Rand have something against children?

They aren’t mentioned, except in passing, in Atlas Shrugged.

Objectivist Answers user “rationaljenn” offers the following answer:

Though children did not figure prominently in any of her novels, that does not imply that Ayn Rand was hostile toward children or family.

Consider this passage from Atlas Shrugged, referring to two children being raised in the Gulch, by a woman who has chosen to move her family to a place so that she can raise her children as she wants to:

The recaptured sense of her [Dagny's] own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. . . . They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world–a look of fear, half- secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.

When I think of how I want to raise my own children, I always think of creating an environment and parenting them in a way so that they can recognize their own value, and have the “open, joyous and friendly confidence of kittens” that these two fictional children described above possess. I think this passage shows Ayn Rand’s benevolence toward children and family. Though she did not choose to have children of her own (lots of people don’t!) and didn’t choose to write books about or for children (lots of authors don’t!), I have never viewed her as hostile to children and family.

For more on this subject, see my posts Mythbusting: Ayn Rand, Mommies and Children and More from Ayn Rand about Childhood.

If you liked that answer, please go vote for it to make it more visible to the world while sending rationaljenn some well-deserved OA “karma.” (And if you think she has missed something important, that’s fine too: you can add a comment to that effect, or contribute a whole new answer of your own!)

Objectivist Answers is an exciting new online resource where anybody can ask questions of Objectivists, and any Objectivist can answer! Please visit with your questions, answers, or both!

Oct 042010
 

Objectivist Answers has really taken off since its launch: it now has about one hundred questions, about 150 answers, and countless comments and votes from a steady stream of visitors!

One of the questions is:

Why not lie to gain a huge reward?

Why, according to Objectivism, shouldn’t I be dishonest in order to gain a large reward? Obviously there are cases where dishonesty would clearly not be to my interests, but aren’t there cases where the lie is small, unlikely to be detected, and the reward could allow me to achieve all sorts of values I care about?

Maybe pause for a moment to consider what would constitute a great answer. What is the essential principle, and what potential distractions should be avoided? What sort of concretes, shared in what way, would help people most easily understand the point? What would help you better understand the issue?

Objectivist Answers user “Publius” offers the following answer:

I think the basic issue is that this kind of question treats “reward” as a stolen concept. To call something a reward is to say that it represents a net gain to the actor. But how do you establish that something is a net gain? You can’t look at it in isolation. Is eating a slice of cake a net gain to someone? It depends: Is he on a diet? Is he diabetic? Is it his birthday? Did he steal it? Etc.

To establish something as a reward requires seeing it in its full context, and its full context is your entire life. And that has a specific meaning. Rand’s morality is not about collecting a bunch of goodies. It’s about living a certain kind of life–a life that is all integrated around a certain conception of what your life is about. Think of Dagny. Her life is about running a railroad, loving Galt, being enthralled by Richard Halley’s music–and these major values are also integrated. It would never even occur to her that something could be a value that didn’t contribute to that sum. Money? It has value to her only insofar as it comes from and contributes to those central values.

To put it a bit differently, Objectivism’s entire view of the nature of evil is that it is about inconsistency–the evil person is the one who does not pursue an integrated spectrum of values. He seeks “values” out of context, but that’s like seeking knowledge out of context. What you gain is not knowledge, even if it looks like knowledge on the surface. Same with values. A person who “gains” ten or a million dollars at the price of inconsistency loses, because he gives up that which gives money (and any other value) its meaning.

Another way to put this point is: values are objective. Part of what that means is that for something to be a genuine value, it has to flow from a rational mental process. The person who discards virtue to gain an alleged value is saying, “To hell with that process.” That is destructive. As Dr. Peikoff explains in OPAR, virtue is one. And by the same token, value is one. To make your values one requires integration. The “if I can get away with it” mentality throws all that out. That’s why in reality “successful” criminals are miserable people who waste away their “winnings” within a very short period. The loot they get has no value to them because nothing has any value to them because they’ve rejected the precondition of valuing: rationality.

If you liked that answer, you can go vote for it to make it more visible to the world while sending Publius some well-deserved OA “karma.” (And if you think he has missed something important, that’s fine too: please go add a comment to that effect, or contribute a whole new answer of your own!)

Objectivist Answers is an exciting new online resource where anybody can ask questions of Objectivists, and any Objectivist can answer! Please visit with your questions, answers, or both!

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