Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1986

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

Philosophy

Major Professor

Kathleen A. Emmett

Abstract

In 1878 the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution deemed corporations to be "persons." The task of this thesis is a philosophical inquiry into the conditions which might constitute personhood and an application of those findings to corporations.

Most philosophers have argued along the lines that what constitutes personhood is the fulfillment of a set of conditions which often include having beliefs, desires, and intentions. This has led many philosophers to conclude that for corporations to be persons there must be a corporate analogue to individual intentionality such that it make sense to talk about corporations having beliefs, desires, etc. Since intentional states such as beliefs and desires are often considered "mental" states, these philosophers see their task as either locating what might count as the "corporate mind," or else arguing that such an endeavor is futile and that ipso facto corporations should not be considered persons. The argument in this thesis is that much of the work in corporate ontology has been misguided by taking this tack. If intentional states are viewed as ascriptions to the system itself (e.g., the human being, the corporation, the computer) rather than being states of the "mind," then many (although certainly not all) of the obstacles to our considering corporations as persons will have been removed.

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