Life & Wisdom Quote by Harold Coffin

Coffin’s line lands like a courtroom objection dressed as theology: you can’t punish a corporation the way you punish a person, because the thing you’re trying to discipline isn’t built to feel shame. The phrasing is deliberately antique - “treason,” “outlawed,” “excommunicated” - a trio of penalties that once worked precisely because they carried moral and social annihilation. They stripped you not only of rights, but of belonging. Coffin is pointing out that corporate personhood is a legal convenience, not an ethical reality.

The intent is less metaphysical than tactical. By saying corporations “have no souls,” he’s attacking the mismatch between modern economic power and the older moral vocabulary societies used to restrain it. A human can be deterred by disgrace, guilt, or spiritual fear; a corporation is designed to route around those pressures. It can rebrand, restructure, merge, dissolve, reconstitute - liability as a shell game. The subtext is a warning: when we grant immense rights to entities that can’t be morally injured, we end up with accountability theater.

Context matters here. Coffin wrote in an era when industrial trusts and railroads were becoming nation-sized actors, and the law was still pretending they were basically citizens with paperwork. His sentence is a preemptive strike against the comforting idea that “the market” will self-correct through reputational consequences. He’s arguing that without coercive regulation - real penalties that hit assets and decision-makers - corporate misconduct isn’t sin. It’s strategy.