In a free market, you can of course spend your money any way you like; if you think a company shouldn't ought to hire people you as a customer disapprove of, then you can boycott that company. But the fact that we're increasingly viewing corporations as responsible and sharing in the guilt of an employee's personal and political views worries me a great deal. It's like we're progressively losing the ability to compartmentalize, and to permit others to compartmentalize, and I think it's fundamentally threatening society's ability to function as a diverse collection of viewpoints.
> But the fact that we're increasingly viewing corporations as responsible and sharing in the guilt of an employee's personal and political views worries me a great deal.
For me it's sort of the other way around entirely. I don't view corporations as "responsible" or "sharing in the guilt", in fact I don't really see corporations as moral entities at all, except insofar as that's sometimes useful to persuade their CEOs to do things (e.g. not destroy the planet with pollution).
I don't know anything about Brave's corporate structure (and don't care to), so take the following as hypothetical. In any business, there are a number of people at the top trying to get rich. And that business will also employ any number of people who are not going to profit (e.g. janitors). I'm sure any business the size of Google employs a few racist janitors, it's just the law of large numbers. I don't "blame" Google for employing these people, nor does it dissuade me from doing business with them.
But when the person at the top running the company and directly profiting from it has terrible views, maybe I have a moral obligation not to give them my money, if that's possible. And if the board of directors of a company chooses to retain a CEO with deplorable views, maybe I have an obligation not to give them my money, either. So I think you can argue that someone has an obligation not to do business with Brave without saying that you blame the corporation as such. This goes double when the people are the top are funneling those profits into campaigns to deny people their rights.
At a high enough level of abstraction, a corporation is just a profit-creation engine. At a high enough level of abstraction, cancer is just a reproduction-oriented microbe. I suppose it doesn't make sense to blame either of them for what it does. Even so, I don't think it's right to aid them.
> society's ability to function as a diverse collection of viewpoints.
I worry about this too, quite a lot actually. But I think one requirement for society to have the ability to function as a diverse collection of viewpoints is that we collectively not tolerate people who have views antithetical to society functioning in that way. It's one thing to believe that it's wrong for gay people to be married: it's another thing to push for the state to prevent them from marrying.
I mean, and I believe that it's one thing to believe that it's wrong to push for the state to prevent gay people from marrying, but it's another entirely to push for companies to fire people who believe that.
I am in favor of gay marriage, but I believe society can survive without it. I'm not sure it can survive without political compartmentalization.
I guess you could call me a libertarian in that I believe that the first and best defense from government, corporate and mob tyranny is to just go somewhere else. The enforcement of mere majority moral beliefs on the entirety of society directly threatens that belief. You may say that's just democracy, but I disagree; I think majority rule is not quite the same. ("51% democracy", if you will.) The flourishing of a society and its peoples is maximized if locally contradictory views can exist simultaneously, preferably by a process of self-sorting. But such a process would, if moral fault is propagated along corporate and financial lines, either damage the economy by effectively decoupling large sections from each other (you see this in the right-wing news market, which has become almost totally disjunct from the left-wing news market, and the split is propagating across logistics lines), or else damage liberty by enforcing the most effective and motivating (!not! the most morally just) beliefs through chilling effects and monopoly positions. That's why I think the decision to support a corporation must be decoupled from the views of the employees, so that the political arena can be insulated from the economical one, allowing a connected economy at the same time as a diverse society.
