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Showing posts from October, 2013

Proper Vehicles for Rights

Would it really be too far to argue that corporations should not have rights? More specifically, I would like to argue that corporate persons do not have rights on par with natural persons. I don't think this is really all that implausible. First and foremost, let's think about why natural persons have rights (when they do). The general trend among democratic theorists is to argue that rights claims among democratic citizens arises from something like mutual consent and recognition of one another as autonomous agents. I'm an autonomous agent, and you're an autonomous agent. If we're going to maintain that autonomy and cooperate, we should guarantee one another that we'll respect one another's autonomy. A system of rights is established that guarantees that we can each do as we please as long as we don't interfere with anyone else doing the same. It's a nice fairytale, and it can be told through the lens of game theory, mutually u