Corporations aren't Religions

In the wake of the passage of the Affordable Care Act (commonly referred to as Obamacare), many groups and institutions have sought to have themselves exempted from various provisions of the law. One of the most common concerns is the requirement that large companies that offer healthcare to their employees must also cover birth control. Many religious groups (Catholics in particular) have sought exemptions from the law on religious grounds, claiming that their First Amendment right to the free-exercise of religion is violated by a law that requires them to do something they consider immoral.

Now in the case of churches, this exemption to the law is generally granted, but many other non-church groups have sought a similar exemption. In a recent case in the Federal Court of Appeal for the Third Circuit, the justices ruled against Conestoga Wood Specialties Corporation, who had sought an exemption from the ACA on the grounds that it violated the religious freedom of the organization. In effect, the Plaintiffs were arguing that because their organization was owned by religious individuals, the private, for-profit corporation was itself a religious entity and therefore entitled to an exemption from the ACA on First Amendment grounds.

I don't want to go into all the details of the case, but I am particularly interested in the concurring opinion (PDF) written by Judge Leonard Garth. There, Judge Garth makes the following argument:

Conestoga further claims that it should be construed as holding the religious beliefs of its owners. This claim is belied by the fact that, as the District Court correctly noted, “‘[i]ncorporation’s basic purpose is to create a distinct legal entity, with legal rights, obligations, powers, and privileges different from those of the natural individuals who created it, who own it, or whom it employs’ . . . . It would be entirely inconsistent to allow the Hahns to enjoy the benefits of incorporation, while simultaneously piercing the corporate veil for the limited purpose of challenging these regulations.” Contestoga, 2013 WL 140110 at *8 (quoting Cedric Kushner Promotions, Ltd. v. King, 533 U.S. 158, 163, 121 S.Ct. 2087, 150 L.Ed.2d 198 (2001)).

In effect, the Judge is arguing that Conestoga is guilty of committing the Fallacy of Composition. This is a fallacy in which one argues that something true of the members of a group is also true of the group as a whole. Here, the Hahn family, owners of Conestoga, are arguing that because they are all religious, that therefore the corporation formed by them is also religious. And the court rejected that argument by noting that religiosity is not a property that crosses the corporate veil.

Some Further Thoughts on Composition and Division

I wanted to make a few additional comments about the Fallacies of Composition and Division. In particular, there are some challenges that arise in correctly applying these two fallacies. As I noted previously, it is clearly an example of Composition if one argues that, "Each piece of this machine is  inexpensive, therefore the whole machine is inexpensive." This is clearly fallacious because the quality of 'inexpensive' does not clearly transfer from parts to whole. But what about this very similar argument, "Each piece of this machine is very expensive, therefore the whole machine is expensive"? Here it does appear that 'expensive' is a quality that would transfer from parts to wholes. If we go in reverse, "The whole machine is expensive, therefore each part is expensive," we have a clear example of the Fallacy of Division. However, "The whole machine is inexpensive, therefore each part is inexpensive," does appear to be a legitimate inference.

So, what is going on here? The simple answer is that words are tricky. A more complex answer is that there are some kinds of attributes that do transfer from parts to wholes but not vice versa, and some kinds of attributes that transfer from whole to parts, but not vice versa.  The key take away from all this is that one must exercise care in applying and labeling fallacies. In the case of these informal fallacies, one can't just identify a certain argumentative form and automatically identify any argument that has that form as fallacious. One can't just say, "you made an inference from parts to wholes, therefore your argument is fallacious." Instead, one must look more deeply into the actual content of the argument and explore what exactly is being asserted before one can identify it as a fallacy. In effect, one must be sensitive to the language used, what that language means, and how it functions in a particular context.

Corporations, Persons and Composition

For this post I plan to move away from the video clips of prior posts and focus on a particular line of argumentation that one finds whenever questions of political campaigns and money come into play. This current election cycle (2012) looks to be the first billion dollar election in US history with each campaign (Obama and Romney) likely to spend over $1 billion in an attempt to become or remain president of the USA. This issue is closely tied to a recent Supreme Court Decision, generally referred to as Citizens United. At stake in this case (among other things) was what rights (particularly free speech rights) corporations have. I don't want to get into the details of the case, but instead focus on some of the comments and justifications of the Supreme Court's decision.

On major line of justification that one can find, for example at the Libertarian think-tank the Cato Institute, suggests that corporations should have rights because they are made up of people with rights. As Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute puts it, "corporations don’t have constitutional rights because they’re corporations, but because they’re made up of individuals, who don’t lose their rights when they associate (in corporate form or otherwise)." The line of thinking appears to be that because individuals have rights, and because a corporation is just a collection of individuals, that collection should possess rights possessed by the individuals who make up that collection. This is, in fact, a nice illustration of the Fallacy of Composition.

The Fallacy of Composition is one of the oldest fallacies known, having been identified by Aristotle in his Sophistical Refutations (I don't suggest reading this text for help understanding these fallacies unless you are fluent in ancient Greek. As the translator notes, verbal fallacies, like puns, don't translate well). In this fallacy, one draws a conclusion about a whole based on attributes of the parts. The key here is that one starts with a claim about parts, and then draws a conclusion about the whole. A classic example would be, "Each part of this machine is inexpensive, therefore the whole machine is inexpensive." The fallacious reasoning here should be clear in that one could have a machine made up of one million parts, each of which costs $1, which, when put together would obviously cost more than $1 Million.  The same fallacy also occurs in the context of groups such as when one draws a conclusion about a group based on the attributes of the members of that group. For example, "Every ship in the fleet is ready for battle, therefore the whole fleet is ready for battle." 

Returning to the example from Shapiro above, we can see the same sort of fallacious reasoning at work. When he argues that corporations should have free speech rights because the members of that corporation have free speech rights he is committing the fallacy of composition by starting with a claim about the members of a group (the corporation) and then inferring a conclusion about the whole group. Again, the fact that the individuals in the group have a certain right to free speech does not imply that the group as a whole should have the same right.