> Being the CEO of any company that serves the democratic public means that one's ethical obligations must reflect the democratic sentiment of the public.

How does one determine the democratic sentiment of the public, especially a public that is pretty evenly ideologically split? Seems fraught with personal interpretation (which is arguably another form of free speech.)

Let's think pragmatically and think of, "democracy" as a way of living which seeks to maximize human felicity and minimize human cruelty. In a fair society there would be/is a consensus that at a basic level our social contract is legitimized by these commitments to that. The issue stems from splitting hairs about what human felicity constitutes. This can be resolved as recognizing that some dignified splitting of these hairs is a necessary component of that felicity. This presents in our society as the public discourse and the contingent but distinct values of communities in their efforts to realize themselves.

I'm reminded of that old line by Tolstoy-- something like, "happy families are all happy for precisely the same reasons; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The point from an Adam Smith perspective is that healthy societies might all end up tending toward the same end by widely different means: Chinese communists might achieve superior cooperation and the realization of their values as, "the good life" by means dissimilar to the Quaker or the African tribesperson. The trick is seeing that the plurality of living forms and their competing values is not a hinderance to cooperation and mutual well-being but an opportunity for extended and renewed discourses about, "what we would like to be as creatures."

Worth mentioning:

https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/Antirepresentationa...