My belief is that a "corporation" is a fiction brought into existence by the state—like copyright. Government gets to say what corporations do or don't do, because without government, corporations just don't exist as a "thing" in the first place—they just become groups of people who happen to be working together.

People have inalienable rights, because people existed before governments did. Corporations don't, because corporations exist as a contract between people-taken-as-a-group (i.e. the state) and people-taken-as-individuals.

This is a good and a bad thing: it means that precepts like "corporations exist to pursue profit at all costs" are not actually "hardcoded" into the laws of the universe, but are just part of the particular way the state has chosen to make corporations work. If we (people-taken-as-whole) stopped thinking that that was a good idea, we could just change the corporate "goal conditions"—and the world would suddenly be different.