The comments to the Western Confucian's "Corporations Are Not Persons" got me thinking about legal/juridic/moral/artificial personhood again. Perhaps the problem is not conferring the status of personhood on a corporation. iirc, corporations (and corporate personhood) finds their origins in the medieval period, if not earlier. (I haven't been able to do much research on this yet. I have yet to read through Bruce Brown's The History of the Corporation.)

I believe governments or other communities (a university, for example?) were early examples of medieval corporations. However, it seems to me that just because such entities are legally defined as persons does not mean that they automatically bear the same sort of rights as human beings. It all depends upon the definition, and it may be the case that a corporation, even if it is made up of human beings, while being more than a group of particular people, does not have the all of the same rights of those members taken individually, or the sum of their rights taken collectively.

Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Corporation.
The current Code of Canon Law's definition of Juridic Persons.
"Canon Law" by Rev. John J. Coughlin, O.F.M.