I agree. We have this notion of creating corporations so that shareholders are not liable for anything. Maybe shareholders should be liable when they break laws and kill people.
If you have to, move it to executives, it could actually justify the insane salaries and bonuses.
Stepping up the level of fines and corporate penalties to be greater than the expected gains from bad behavior is a much more workable solution. Companies were much more careful to not act too monopolistically when the government was in full trust busting mode.
Yes, the fines should probably be increased and enforced. But if I, as an investor, decide to put $10 into Uber, I only risk my $10 if Uber kills more people and breaks more laws. It seems to me I should have more responsibility than that for encouraging such behavior.
Shareholders shouldn't (unless there's clear mens rea, such as when they set up the corporation in order to break laws) but officers of the corporation should, and probably already are.
That's an extraordinarily huge presumption to make about someone, especially, in practice, an "investor" isn't even a natural person.
Moreover, the "person" who owns the shares may not be the one who made the purchase decision, such as with venture capital, hedge funds, and mutual funds [1].
Even an individual, natural person may buy a particular stock based purely on financials, or even just price (such as day traders). No awareness of business practices is necessary.
Then there's short-selling. Who owns those shares, at which point in time?
Most of these questions (ownership, not purchase decision responsibility) do need to have an answer for the purpose of corporate voting, but only occasionally and not to determine criminal liability for an arbitrary point in time. The latter would be remarkably impractical, if not unfair.
[1] Assuming one pierces that "veil" of ownership
My understanding is that Uber is privately held, mostly by venture capitalists who expect it to increase in value once it monopolizes the market. We are not talking about a publicly held, well-governed organization.