It's precisely this pattern that sours me on the recent "corporate social responsibility" trend. If all that's standing between our society and dystopia is the strenuous objections of a few employees, we're going to get a dystopia. Even if the individuals that comprise a corporation are decent human beings, the emergent behavior of the corporate egregore inexorably trends toward evil.

Now, I'm very far from saying we should ban corporations. They're quite useful, for all the reasons classical economics tells us. But we should stop expecting them to be moral. Instead, let's just accept that the object of a corporation is to maximally profit within the law, then use the law to constrain corporate behavior while retaining corporate benefits.

The state is the only entity powerful enough to go toe-to-toe against the profit motive and win. Activists, however well-intentioned, just don't have the firepower.

If I can proffer an opinion that's probably unpopular: I think prominent CSR activism is probably harmful on a net basis. It accrues attention to itself and deprives more serious efforts, ones that operate at the level of the law, of oxygen. If you want to change how corporations behave, change their incentives.