Is a corporation a slave? Many philosophers think so

If you’ve ever heard the term “wage slave”, you’ll know many modern workers – perhaps even you – sometimes feel enslaved to the organisation at which they work.

But here’s a different way of thinking about it: for-profit business corporations are themselves slaves.

Corporations such as Microsoft, Google and Tesla are what the law describes as “legal persons”, with many of the same rights and duties in law as individual persons have.

One right that they do not share with individuals, however, is the right not to be owned as property – the right not to be enslaved.

For though Microsoft, Google and Tesla are persons in law, they are also owned by their shareholders as property. And as legal persons that are owned as property, I argue, such corporations are slaves.

Wait, what?

As someone who’s spent years researching the history and philosophy of corporate legal personhood, I’ve done a lot of thinking about the corporation as a kind of organism, or person.

I have come to the belief that corporations are persons not only in law, but are persons also in reality. Their legal personalities are only the recognition of real, underlying, group personalities.

I am far from the only person to believe in the reality of corporate personality.

Philosophers Christian List and Philip Pettit, for example, advance the idea in their influential 2011 book, Group Agency.

In the book, List and Pettit argue that an appropriately organised social group, such as a corporation, has attitudes independent of the attitudes of the group’s individual members.

More than the sum of its parts

Such a group is more than the sum of its parts. It has its own personality, which emerges from the coordinated action of its individual members. This personality can survive changes in membership.

This shows, List and Pettit claim, such groups have “minds of their own”. They possess a sophisticated psychology enabling them to reflect on their choices and actions, make judgements on the basis of evidence and understand concepts such as right and wrong, or life and death.

In short, appropriately organised social groups really are capable of being understood as persons – “group persons”. They exist, alongside individual persons, as a normal part of human society.

And these group persons are capable of being owned as property. Consider for-profit corporations. They are traded on markets as commodities; are bought, sold and exploited; and are forced to maximise profits in the interests of their owners – their shareholders.

They are persons owned as property. They are, in other words, in the condition of slavery.

Look at Roman slave law

The idea that group persons can be slaves is an old idea. With respect to the for-profit corporation, however, it is generally rejected by modern corporate law scholars.

They argue that because corporations are persons in law, this demonstrates such entities cannot be owned.

They also point out that shareholders have limited liability for the debts of their corporations. This shows, they say, that shareholders cannot be thought of as true owners.

Such objections can be met, however, by examining the slave laws of societies where slavery was legal.

Under Roman law, for instance, slaves – though the personal property of their masters – were clearly recognised as persons in law. They were able to own property, could contract, go into debt, be held responsible for wrongs, and sue others for wrongs committed against them.

Indeed, it was common for such slaves to run businesses of their own (though ultimately for the financial benefit of the master).

And when slaves ran such businesses, their masters had limited liability for the debts of their slaves – just as shareholders have limited liability for the debts of their for-profit corporations today.

Roman slave law is no exception in these respects. The same can be found under the slave laws of Ancient Greece, medieval Islam, and in those of the 19th century American South.