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Over the past few decades, socioeconomic thinking has shifted away from capitalism's traditional narrow emphasis on corporate profits and toward a more purposive approach characterized by a new mantra: "People over profit" (Partridge 2015). The underlying message here is that serving society is more important than extracting wealth from society. Scholars have uncovered ample evidence that there is no real trade-off in actuality, as firms increase profits by doing social good (Falck and Heblich 2007; Harrison et al. 2010; Jones et al. 2018). Stakeholders, including customers, employees, financiers, suppliers, and communities, tend to support and invest in firms that "do good." Thus, stakeholder theory suggests that firms perform worse when pursuing profit maximization and better when pursuing a stakeholder strategy of corporate activism under the label corporate social responsibility (hereafter CSR). By corporate activism or CSR, we mean activities performed by the firm unrelated to the firm's economic activities, instead aimed at non-profit-seeking social or political objectives. Stakeholder theory's instant popularity as a business ethic brushed aside the academic debate initiated by Friedman's controversial 1970 essay concluding that firms" moral duty was to maximize profits.! This stakeholder theoretic paradigm led to the creation of new institutional rules, both formal and informal, including the environmentalsocial-governance (ESG) business scoring system as a primary investment criterion (Van Duuren et al. 2016).
Consistent with this paradigm shift, the business ethics literature abounds with CSR advocacy (see Fatima and Elbanna 2023 for a review). Few scholars challenge the moral foundations and assumptions underlying such corporate activism (some notable exceptions include, e.g., Goodpaster 1991; Pava and Krausz 1997; Hasnas 2013). Instead, most scholars accept unquestioningly the moral status and validity of the aims of CSR, while the mechanisms by which such practices are enacted have largely been sidestepped. Consequently, CSR activities often cater to the most vocal activists rather than the broader population. But a critical review of the CSR literature reveals a fundamental flaw in its assumptions and conclusions, as evidenced by the recent, costly marketing errors of Nike, Gillette, Target, and AB InBev. For example, AB InBev's Bud Light team enlisted influencer Dylan Mulvaney (Gasparino 2024), who famously documented her gender transition experience beginning in 2022 on social media, to promote its popular beer on social media. Mulvaney's infamous...