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Re:How the food lobby fights sugar regulation in the EU [pdf] by brudgers on Saturday July 30, 2016 @10:47AM (#12193162)
To me, the acts of legally constructed fictitious persons are amoral not evil [or good]. The legally constructed fictitious person is just a messier meat space version of the Etherium fueled Dao. A legally constructed fictitious person has marching orders and those orders are an ends justify the means mandate...as I was writing that I was thinking "constrained only by law" but that's some utopia we don't have.

To me, anthropomorphizing fictitious persons is an intellectual landmine. A fictitious person is an 'it', no more a moral or ethical agent than a rock. A mountain of rock isn't evil when a slide buries a party of hikers. Gravity is a law of natural systems. The behaviors of legally constructed fictitious persons are in accord with the "laws" of those systems.

Re:How the food lobby fights sugar regulation in the EU [pdf] by tim333 on Saturday July 30, 2016 @11:08AM (#12193248)
If a tobacco company say starts giving cigarettes to 5 year olds to get them hooked you don't think that's evil? What difference does it make that a company is a bunch of people rather than one?

I'll give you that it's trickier to deal with bad stuff done by a corporation. With an individual you can jail them but less so with a corp unless you can pin it on an individual.

Re:How the food lobby fights sugar regulation in the EU [pdf] by brudgers on Saturday July 30, 2016 @11:16AM (#12193291)
No. Tobacco companies are not moral agents.

Such a scenario might well involve individuals engaged in banal evil and because individuals are moral agents, that's where blame and praise may accrue.

Anthropomorphizing a tobacco company muddies our thinking. A trade agreement is a document. The consequences of following the ideas in that document may be detrimental. But it is not a moral agent.

Re:How the food lobby fights sugar regulation in the EU [pdf] by josinalvo on Saturday July 30, 2016 @11:51AM (#12193464)
Your definition of moral agent is not very useful.

For me, a moral agent is not one that can 'feel responsible', but one that I can affect, by changing my own behavior, when it does 'something bad'.

The discussion of internal states is less useful. Also, the discussion of morality of people I can't affect is less useful.

Re:How the food lobby fights sugar regulation in the EU [pdf] by brudgers on Saturday July 30, 2016 @12:24PM (#12193584)
Not very useful definitions are by definition more useful than useless definitions.

If a person lobs avalanche prevention ordinance upon an unstable mountain slope thereby preventing the demise of the hikers I invented earlier, that person's actions might be said to have affected the behavior of the mountain.

If the person lobs ordinance after the invented hikers have met their fate, that person may well change the mountain slope geometry in such a manner that unique unstable accumulations are no longer physically possible [while others may be].

Clearly neither seems like a case where there is moral agency in the mountain. We get moral agency when the person lobbing ordinance onto the mountain slope is doing or forgoing the activity in the presence of hikers.

Re:How the food lobby fights sugar regulation in the EU [pdf] by tim333 on Saturday July 30, 2016 @01:12PM (#12193765)
Things don't need to be moral agents to be good bad or evil. I had a good bath and a bad haircut but neither of those are moral agents.
Re:How the food lobby fights sugar regulation in the EU [pdf] by jedharris on Saturday July 30, 2016 @01:38PM (#12193860)
Interesting position. This implies that corporations, by default, have no social rights or interests at all -- while humans, by default, have all human rights and interests.

I kind of like this. No free speech or even property ownership rights for corporations, unless we decide it is in our interest. Only humans can be the source of rights or interests.

It will involve a pretty big reworking of the laws, however. Let's get started!

Re:How the food lobby fights sugar regulation in the EU [pdf] by jedharris on Saturday July 30, 2016 @01:51PM (#12193920)
For example since corporations (etc.) have no interests, if their behavior impinges on the interests of even one person that behavior has to be stopped, unless someone can show that that more peoples' interests are served by that behavior than are harmed.

In the case of TPP the attempts to show how it benefits individuals rely on a lot of hypotheticals which doesn't wash if we take this stance. Everyone gains standing to stop corporations if their interests are affected, and the burden of proof is on those who want to permit some corporate behavior that anyone opposes.

Re:How the food lobby fights sugar regulation in the EU [pdf] by brudgers on Saturday July 30, 2016 @02:07PM (#12193990)
The fictitious person legal construct has legal rights and institutional interests. I'm not sure how that maps to social rights and interests.

In any events, rights seem orthogonal to morality. At least if morality constrains some portion of the acts that a moral agent could do because a right is a license for a particular course of action.

Anyway, while changing the laws might produce the greatest benefit and utilitarianism might be a good basis for rational moral action, that's not really my immediate intent. My goal is more pragmatic discussion and less sloganeering.