Comment & Debate
“Chapter 3 – Should Corporations Have Rights?”: “[The] reason why corporate autonomy should be protected by rights is that individuals who exercise corporate autonomy by acting as a corporation forfeit some of their own autonomy in doing so. For instance, shareholders give up the right to control their own property, and employees their own labour. On a deeper, psychological level, members of a corporation are forced to accept organisational roles and objectives that may conflict with their authentic selves,4 and must adopt role distance to shield their personal integrity. The fact that corporate power compromises individual autonomy has long been recognised, and has been received with varying degrees of pessimism.6 My own view is more positive. Members of a corporation who forego their individual autonomy in order to join it do so because they with to become part of a larger autonomous entity. In a sense, members of a corporation oluntarily “transfer” a portion of their own autonomy to the corporation in order that they may share in its autonomy instead. Looked at in this way, to refuse to protect the autonomy of a corporation would be to depreciate the value of the autonomy given up by its members.”