Three years ago, I attended a public talk at the University of California, Berkeley School of Business. The topic was corporate social responsibility, and the speaker was David Greenberg, senior vice-president and chief compliance officer at Altria, parent corporation of tobacco giant Philip Morris. Greenberg was a smiling, somewhat self effacing guy about my own age, and he began his talk by saying how he appreciated our willingness to listen, because he wanted to tell us some things about his company that “might surprise” us.

Greenberg said the organisation had recently done a lot of soul searching and realised it needed to change—there was a new “openness” in “Altria’s journey,” as Greenberg put it, in which the organisation had “outed ourselves.” He alluded to “almost religious” battles within the corporation about the “new” stance of “responsibility,” as part of which Altria/Philip Morris finally admits (on its website and in direct mail materials and advertisements) that cigarettes cause disease. The company sounded near-heroic as Greenberg boasted of its “partnering” with leading health organisations in support of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation of tobacco.

For …