I had forgotten this important bit of legal history. Like copyright and other legal tricks once meant to enrich the citizens they have been bent and captured to serve a small few. We have forgotten that the intent of the generations old stick we have long grown accustomed to beating us was designed as a lever to make our collective lives better.
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I had not thought of this problem. But seriously the concept of man an woman would at that point be irrelevant. Going further even now a gay trans man can get married and have a baby. I wonder what Westboro Baptist Church would think of that, salvation or damnation.
The four âobjectionableâ methods do not cause abortions - they kill sperm and/or slow ovulation. If you cared, which you clearly donât, you could <a href=âhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_contraception"target=â_blank">read up on it.
My deity encourages women to take charge of their own destinies however they see fit. Stop trampling on my religious freedom.
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Its always best while being pedantic to realize it 
I mean, yes, youâre right, corporate person-hood, the legal fiction that it is is often misrepresented.
Fortunately this is not a court of law but of opinions and you get points not for being accurate but for being compelling. (For good or bad)
The problem with trying to defend a dictionary and letter of the law definition is that it makes no difference to the conversation at hand or to the anti social behavior of some corporations.
In the Hobby Lobby case, who is being protected, the corporation or the owners?
Seems to me the owners, and in the bargain the corporation has gained conscience, not an AI type of consciousness, but a legal fiction of a consciousness. Itâs certainly a fight for a soul.
Now I get that the court wants to avoid limiting freedom of religious belief and expression, but I also think that in doing so it has actually forced the religious beliefs of the Hobby Lobby owners onto its employees, not a win/win situation here. (Yes, they can get contraception other ways, but they still have to jump through hoops because their Christian bosses might be offended)
Look, we donât have to agree here, this is just what I think, but it is not at all a controversial point of view that corporate person-hood is used by rich people to get away with awful things. And that in order to continue doing so, they are perfectly willing and capable of making fictional corporate âpeopleâ more and more real every day. And that this is what people mean when they âmisrepresentâ corporations as people.
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As long as this Hobby Lobby debacle is somehow a milestone in convincing people of how ridiculous employer-tied health insurance is, and inches us closer to single payerâŚ
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All kinds of brilliant, well done! 1000 Internets to you sir!
Nonsense like this brings to mind once again that, as a U.S. citizen, I am required by law to financially support international criminal organizations (the Catholic church, for example) so that they can have more capital available to use as hush money against their multitude of victims. I happen to believe itâs immoral and unethical to force me to aid and abet serious crimes. Why doesnât the first amendment protect my beliefs? Oh, yeah: non-Christian female. No rights for you! /soupnazi
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I stand corrected in my short statement.
I would have more correctly said,
âThis has nothing to do with protecting their religious rights, and everything to do with their bottom line.â
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You make a good point about dilution of who owns a company until it is difficult to discern if there is even a person at all. In that instance, it would be pretty hard for owners to claim a religious conflict, since there isnât a discernible owner. But other soulless behavior does seem to exist.
But hereâs a trick Iâve learned since leaving a big company, but still dealing with multi-billion dollar corporations: people make decisions for their own benefit and justify it as in the company interest. I used to think they made decisions for the benefit of the company, but they donât.
Example: I deal with the FDA. When seeking approval for a new product, some poor bureaucrat must decide yes or no. If he says yes, and is wrong, he is in trouble. If he says no, and is wrong, meh⌠So you have silly rejections that keep good products off the market, against the intent of the FDA, because of personal calculus. (Itâs not quite that simple, but serves for this example).
Iâve also seen this in decisions for corporate mergers, launching new product lines, etc etc. Every decision is in context of âHow will this hurt or help my career?â Most of the time, the default is to do nothing until you can get a big gold star ⌠and blame any failure on the decisions of someone else. This includes CEOâs and members of the Board of Directors.
So even apparently inhuman decisions by corporations are in reality those of someone just trying to maximize what happens to them. Maybe itâs an owner. Maybe itâs the CEO. Maybe itâs some drone in legal.
So⌠Change how people do the cost benefit analysis to themselves, and you get better outcomes. It can be as simple an idea as making not acting like an asshole the cultural norm (easy idea, not easy task). Or it can be as complicated as detailed laws.
The problem with detailed laws that only target for profit corporations is that it does nothing to change the motivations of millions of people who are still seeking the same outcome they were before the law went into effect. It becomes like trying to contain jello by squeezing tighter.
Do I have the solutions? Heck no! But I certainly believe that they exist and that we are going about finding them the wrong way.
One of the maxims of systems analysis is: âThe system that you have is designed to get the results that youâre getting.â
The system that we have is designed with so many unstable feedback loops that I have no idea how to bring it back into control without making it explode. But thatâs where the solutions, if any, must lie: proper Von Neumann-style feedback-control theory, with stability analysis.
I think we also need to work on fear as a motivator. Mostly itâs not, âwhat will advance my career?â any more. Itâs âwhat is the least likely thing to get me fired tomorrow?â Until youâre at the level of management for which itâs âwhatâs the least likely thing to get my name smeared over the papers and my arse hauled into court?â People, from the CEO on down to the janitor, are all scared, and scared people are stupid.
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And the apparently human decisions of humans are actually just clusters of neurons trying to maximize what happens to them (admittedly, neurons have a different idea of maximization than humans do, but as you point out, humans have a different idea of maximization than neurons do).
Ultimately the system is the thing. The people, to borrow a phrase from Morrissey, are as replaceable as car parts.
Iâm going to build on kennykb here:
Adam Smithâs observation that people do things out of self interest has become a self-fulfilling prophecy because of fear. Psychologists study how people really behave and the self-interest theory falls flat. But when people are very afraid they revert to self-interest. We swallowed the âeconomicsâ poison and it got us exactly what it promised.
To borrow another phrase, this time from Suresh Naidu, capital is a set of property rights entitling bearers to politically protected rights of control, exclusion, transfer, and derived cash ďŹow. If we change the rights that ownership entails, then we change the degree to which wealth is rewarded with more wealth, and we remove the incentive to keep everyone afraid. We see this in other parts of the world. Less inequality generally means everyone is happier - including the richest people. While laws that target profits canât do everything, they can have a far more massive effect than you think.
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You last paragraph says it much better than I did. Thank you.
As Dahlia Lithwick says
For one thing we areâgoing forwardâno longer allowed to argue the science. âIt is not for us to say that their religious beliefs are mistaken or insubstantial,â writes Alito. Also, going forward, we are not allowed to argue the depth of religious conviction. Once those are off the table in this case, they are either off the table forever, or the court will decide in the future whatâs off and whatâs on.
So away with your science. Hobby Lobby has the right to be mistaken.
Iâve noticed some of the same things you mention, but I always thought it was because no one person is accountable, so you get a lot of deflecting, to the point where a boardroom full of people who signed off on an idea will sit there and ask who made such a bonehead decision.
When it is pointed out that they got what they asked for, suddenly, it doesnât matter whoâs responsible or even whats wrong, theyâll just say: âLets focus on the solutionâ
Zero accountability is one of the things that allows businesses to be dumb and not learn from their mistakes. Heck, sometimes, everybody knows whatâs wrong, whoâs responsible and how to fix it, but nobody will call them out on it for fear of being called out on their own mistakes in the future, or in the past! And If a decision they make affects a lot of people in the real world, it doesnât matter, after all, they are not on the hook for it.
I would suggest that limiting corporate liability, not necessarily eliminating it, but certainly curtailing it, would address a big part of this problem, for good or bad.
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