Public companies are not in the business of self-sacrificial gestures for reasons of principle or any other reason.

Their mission primarily is what’s best for the share price, i.e., in the best interest of shareholders.

This explains Netflix’s behavior in the Dave Chappelle matter. Netflix has showered money on the comedian, boasted of his...

The trailer for Netflix’s stand-up comedy special 'Dave Chappelle: The Closer' plays on a laptop in New York, Oct. 16.

Photo: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg News

Public companies are not in the business of self-sacrificial gestures for reasons of principle or any other reason.

Their mission primarily is what’s best for the share price, i.e., in the best interest of shareholders.

This explains Netflix’s behavior in the Dave Chappelle matter. Netflix has showered money on the comedian, boasted of his viewer appeal. Mr. Chappelle in turn has showered praise on Netflix co-chiefs Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos as defenders of artistic freedom. Mr. Chappelle may be a valuable property but he’s not nearly as valuable to shareholders as Messrs. Hastings and Sarandos, who’ve in some sense decided the threesome must hang together to avoid hanging separately.

This is the same company, after all, that fired a loyal executive because he said the n-word in an innocent discussion with colleagues about the offensive word’s presence in Netflix fare. But the executive wasn’t valuable to shareholders. He also was white. Sacrificing him was an easy decision to protect the position of Mr. Hastings, who is valuable.

Mr. Chappelle is black. This helps. But sadly irrelevant is the fact that his latest Netflix special, while not especially funny, is also not transphobic, the charge leveled by activists. Absurdly, the line some find most incendiary was his statement “gender is a fact.” This doesn’t insult anybody. It only violates an ideological taboo that was invented almost overnight, and that activists now seek to enforce against eight billion human beings who, until yesterday, took gender to be a face-value reality.

Trying to change people’s minds about such matters is what debate is for. Forcing ideas down their throats is something else. Anybody who listens to Mr. Chappelle can hear he’s not opposed to transsexualism, he’s opposed to identitarian aggression against others.

Netflix would go on to fire an activist worker who leaked internal data on what Mr. Chappelle was paid. It disciplined three others who invaded a management video conference to stage a protest.

These moves by Netflix weren’t brave either—companies can’t survive if they don’t control their data and impose some strictures on employee behavior. But they provided a useful example anyhow.

An interesting parallel is the New York Times,

with its succession of recent surrenders that seem to put a traditional reader in doubt about whether the paper can be relied upon to report truthfully and rationally on matters involving progressive hot buttons.

Once upon a time this would have been fatal to a newspaper that aspired to be a paper of record. But the internet has changed industry economics. Arguably now the business model shareholders have signed up for is precisely one of catering to reader prejudice. Discomfiting facts might still be reported but no claim is likely to be supported in its pages that contradicts the package of virtue signals the paper sells to readers whose need is to see their idealized selves reflected back at them.

It’s good to remind ourselves that the human virtues that are most admirable—courage, truthfulness, resistance to injustice—are admirable because they are rare. Ninety-nine percent of us assume we’d have been among the 1% who actively opposed the Nazis; we’d have been abolitionists if born in the Deep South.

Unfortunately, we’re kidding ourselves. What is often sold in the moment as courage, or “speaking truth to power,” is simply conforming to the self-righteousness of whoever has power. This means: If you’re a Netflix contributor whose “impact value” isn’t in Mr. Chappelle’s league, you can count on being thrown overboard for exactly the reason he wasn’t—if that’s the move that will best enable Netflix leaders to go on making decisions that benefit shareholders.

This episode deserves to be appreciated for a second reason—the widely quoted description of Netflix by a transsexual activist as an “amoral algorithm cult.” On reflection, it’s unclear how this slur really differs from Mr. Hastings’s own description of the company as one that exists to “please our members.”

But it does highlight an insidious problem already arising in our new “golden age” of television. In the compressed arc that took us from “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” to “Bridgerton” and “Squid Game”—and from early Chappelle to late Chappelle—is the danger that Nietzsche (to drag him in) pointed to: What once seemed transporting can quickly come to seem a bag of cheap tricks.

Shoveling money at screenwriters and producers, as Netflix and its competitors are doing, is not likely to prove a fix to this problem. The knack that Messrs. Hastings and Sarandos have shown for finding something new and fresh to put in front of viewers is unlikely to prove infinitely self-renewing.

Into the vacuum the conformity police will inevitably enter, even if they’ve experienced a setback in the case of Mr. Chappelle. Maybe this is why Messrs. Hastings and Sarandos have started talking up videogames, merchandising and even sports rights as future refuges for Netflix shareholders.

The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Petersen and Bill McGurn. The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition