The idea of corporate personhood is the idea that corporates should be referred and recognized by constitutional law as an individual person that has rights given to protect them. Having said that this doesn’t include that corporates are not given all of the rights that are given to people. I believe for anyone and everyone this is where the problem arises to ask us where are the boundaries for a situation like this. Before discussing any further I want to discuss where I believe the biggest problems will occur from this relationship. I think that people, regardless their motive and goals, will try their best to benefit from the companies they work for and hope that they will be protected from the company. This situation shows how corporates can be taken advantage of and for that reason are not given all the same rights and humans and cannot protect humans but rather will aim to protect the corporation itself. This could easily happen the other way around too.
The legal ramifications for corporate personhood have been a problem since the 1800s. It is important to remember that the constitution was written before corporates were actually established and ran for things other than public services. The first time we saw the state protect corporations was when chief Justice John Marshall defended Dartmouth college as a “private corporation”. Soon corporates were given the ability to sue in federal courts. Corporates were individuals in a sense that they could sue and be sued and have contracts but obviously couldn’t do things like vote. The argument of whether or not corporate personhood is a real thing goes till this day. American corporations seem to become more and more politically involved and this worries a lot of people because they don’t always have a democratic approach. According to justice John Paul Stevens:
Stevens argued that corporate political speech did not merit protection because “the structure of a business corporation … draws a line between the corporation’s economic interests and the political preferences of the individuals associated with the corporation; the corporation must engage the electoral process with the aim to enhance the profitability of the company, no matter how persuasive the arguments for a broader … set of priorities.”
I believe that IBM was not ethical in doing business with Nazi Germany because the provided them with the help to achieve the destruction of Jewish People. A horrible genocide like that one should not be supported by any ethical person. IBM was able to build machines that could track information of all Jewish people living in the eastern world. Unfortunately, it is true that a good chunk of the technology Nazi Germany used came from the American company IBM. It is clear that IBM demonstrated an unethical decision in aiding the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe. I believe that a company like IBM should be responsible for the death of those innocent people because they knew what the technology was being used for before it was even used. IBM, or any company, should refrain from doing business with immoral or unethical organizations because it is purely the right thing to do.
If corporations are given the same rights as persons, they should definitely be expected to have the same ethical and moral obligations. If corporations want to have the rights of persons in the first place they have to understand that person rights also come with ethical and moral obligation. You see in a case study like IBM and Nazi Germany we can see immediately that these obligations are not met. IBM could deserve its rights, if it had met the same ethical and moral obligations of people. IBM provided assistance to murdering each and every one of the Jews.
Ethical and Professional Issues 