ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines why people should recognise corporations as possessed of great significance within the social domain. It explains that within their taxonomy of the social world there is a distinction to be made between social groups and corporations. The chapter suggests that there is a difference in kind between corporations and groups. At a high level of taxonomic generality one can hold that both groups and corporations are material entities, and so share in a very high order kindhood. The family of practices, values and goals characterising the French people or the Jones family or the philosophy department seminar group are internal to those group-constituting practices, values and goals; they are not framed or calibrated by an external set of rules. A further way in which corporations would be distinguished from groups is if corporations were regarded as persons, for groups are not persons. In particular corporations would have a claim in virtue of that personhood to moral agency.
