> People work for the company, and they decided.

I think you have an incorrect model of the incentive structure and actual power dynamics of publicly owned corporations.

Even the CEO has to answer to shareholders in the end.

The CEO has to answer to shareholders when it comes to keeping his job and to legislators when it comes to abiding the regulations in every market. It's a tough act to follow if you try to maximize shareholder returns while also trying to stay out of prison.

I never said people aren't human, I said apple aren't human they're a corporation.

And people who knowingly leverage their gigantic corporation to make life worse for others in the name of shareholder profit can and should be dehumanized. There nothing humane in hurting others for greed.

I get what you're saying, but Apple are a group of people, so they are human.

Like the local book club, or Hamas.

Anyway, you don't have to look very far to see the many horrible things done to humans by other humans.

The word "humane", in my view, defines how we would like to be, not how we really are.

Ship of Theseus. If you replace every single human at Apple with someone different, it's still Apple. Apple is, at this point, a separate entity, under control by a given group of humans at a given time, but that can change.

The problem is considering "Apple" itself a person, as corporate personhood does. Thinking of companies, even in limited contexts, as a "person" allows the individuals actually making decisions to be largely immune from liability on a personal level. Maybe that should change.

Apple is more than the sum of its parts.

Technically a person is just a bunch of cells, but those cells are interchangable, replaceable (indeed few last more than a couple of decades), and if you lose an individual cell nothing happens to the person, but the cell can’t function.

we don’t say the cells make decisions, we say people do. With a corporation it’s the corporation that makes the decisions, not the individual cells.

Agreed, there's definitely the emergence principle at work when looking at how groups of people function.

The population of a city or a nation is similarly greater than the sum of its parts, and there is an emergent property in both cases. Same as an ant colony.

2 things though.

The constituant parts of a corporation are human, unlike an ant colony. So in that sense they are human, and ant colonies are ant.

Regarding ourselves, we absolutely are an assembly of cells, it wouldn't be wrong to define us as such, although not terribly convenient. But interchangeable the cells are not, well not like a person to a corporation.

A cell can't move from one person to another, if it somehow disagreed with a decision of the central nervous system.

The human brain is made up of billions of cells, and decisions of the brain are heavily dictated by the digestive system and various hormones. A corporate board is at the most, what, maybe a few dozen people? There isn't the same level of responsibility of each component.

Finally, if the entire corporation decides as one entity, how to punish for wrongdoing?

Should every component of the corporation be put in jail if the corporation kills people (looking at you Boeing), or just the humans at the top that made those decisions?

Another way of looking at it: Is the entirety of the Palestinian population responsible for the decisions of the dozens of humans that are the Hamas leadership?

The decision makers still have agency, but structures exist to prevent those who would make un-profitable decisions from reaching the top of the corporation in the first place. Once they’re there, their choices are constrained somewhat and (with nuances) profitable decisions are incentivized over others. The consequence is that, while individuals possess agency, we can also observe that the average individual’s behavior is predictable and in service of the corporate machine in aggregate. You can punish the ghoulish person who decided, along with a few others, to dump toxic waste into the river, while still recognizing that their actions were an inevitable result of the incentives we created for them. The most productive thing, of course, would be to change the incentives, but baby steps.

Your way of thinking advocates for no accountability by employees. The company did it?

Looking at a corporation as a single entity from the outside it seems more like some sociopathic, mildly superhuman ai than a group of people. Of course it’s composed of people, but is that really the most useful frame to view it through? It’s nothing like a book club.

Agree entirely on principle, but nobody should be dehumanized, if nothing else because it is a very ineffective way to model your opponent.

And hurting other for greed is surely not humane, but it is very much human. Big difference that e at the end.

Modeling a group of people, answerable to yet another, even larger group of people, as “a person” is what I would call even worse modeling.

It's not that a company is a person. It's that it's multiple people, some of whom make decisions.

Exactly, and groups of people behave differently from a single person in many important ways.

Yes - they have more legs. But what they are not is a homogenised mass, all as equally guilty or innocent of issues as the other. If 3 executives do something bad, those 3 executives are to blame. And not some nothing-to-do-with-people corporation.

I agree! That's why I didn't say "are culpable differently" but "behave differently".

One of HN's biggest intellectual blind spots is mistaking explanation with justification. Looks like your comment was caught up in that.