Idea for a startup: a ratings service to track and rate the ethics/values of companies. This company would be to ethics as S&P is to finance. It would probably have more clout though, if it has a way of distributing its product to the person in the street. The person in the street probably cares more about ethical performance than finance performance when they are making daily buying decisions.
This has been done for the sake of creating an 'ethical' investment vehicle. There were a few index funds that were built around investing in ethical companies.
The problem was that over time almost every company in the S&P500 made it into the indices. The example I remember off the top of my head was a company with a terrible environmental record getting on the list of 'good' companies due to their generous maternity leave policy.
Gigantic companies are so gigantic that they have many examples of good and evil inside them, just like every other organization full of humans.
