Your comment dragged me into a rabbit hole, which is always a welcome surprise.
From my readings, one can always debate whether this reason for celibacy is whole or not (of course, more holy reasons were given, like purity of the ritual among others), but avoiding inheritance from father to sons was certainly a big factor. By barring heirs from the equation, it solved the whole dispute over inheritance. Yet, when it comes to clerical office and priesthood, "property" is not quite right, since it's mostly about usufruct and benefices, moreso. Which can be significant assets, that goes without saying, hence the Church did everything it could, for holy and not-so-holy-reasons, that traditional generational transmission does not apply. No next generation, no problem.
Quite importantly to the Roman Catholic Church, they wanted to avoid dynasties of priests that would grow in importance and out of their control, so they did whatever they could (ban marriage and fatherhood) so that a mis-aligned priest would only be a temporary nuisance to the Institution.
A lot went into this short burst of investigation, like the fact that early Churches were private property of land-owners, building churches for indulgences and power, reinforcing their ties with the Church, and I may dig deeper. Thanks for your comment again, if you have some references you recommend, I'd appreciate you share them!
Accountability, that's the liability everyone seems to have forgotten in our LLM-driven era. You can close your eyes as much you want during your sessions with Claude or whatever, at the end of the day, only a human can be held accountable.
Not too hopeful here as we see the major labs continuously break rules and are not held accountable for anything. Accountability in general is on a major decline, in case no one has noticed.
I didn't even mention anything about AI, so no reason to bring it into this. Lawyers or not, it signals to other companies and society in general that repercussions are at least less severe now, or in some cases non-existent.
That's just it, though: we don't hold humans accountable.
Incorporation is a way to split a human's financial assets from the company they run so that they don't lose everything when the company is successfully sued. Corporate governance boards often have the C-suite executives they're meant to govern on the board. The average person does not have the financial resources needed to take on most companies in court, no matter how justified the suit might be. Companies force arbitration clauses in license agreements at will. Companies like Meta settle with the government for pennies on the dollar in massive lawsuits.
Effectively, at the scale many tech companies work at, there is no effective legal way to hold the company accountable.
From my readings, one can always debate whether this reason for celibacy is whole or not (of course, more holy reasons were given, like purity of the ritual among others), but avoiding inheritance from father to sons was certainly a big factor. By barring heirs from the equation, it solved the whole dispute over inheritance. Yet, when it comes to clerical office and priesthood, "property" is not quite right, since it's mostly about usufruct and benefices, moreso. Which can be significant assets, that goes without saying, hence the Church did everything it could, for holy and not-so-holy-reasons, that traditional generational transmission does not apply. No next generation, no problem.
Quite importantly to the Roman Catholic Church, they wanted to avoid dynasties of priests that would grow in importance and out of their control, so they did whatever they could (ban marriage and fatherhood) so that a mis-aligned priest would only be a temporary nuisance to the Institution.
A lot went into this short burst of investigation, like the fact that early Churches were private property of land-owners, building churches for indulgences and power, reinforcing their ties with the Church, and I may dig deeper. Thanks for your comment again, if you have some references you recommend, I'd appreciate you share them!