A huge rethink is going on about the values that underpin the whole capitalist system in the light of the global economic crisis. I’ve been struck by the number of senior executives who have called for an emphasis on moral and ethical values.

Take for instance Stephen Green, Chairman of HSBC bank. Addressing the annual Confederation of British Industry conference last November, he said: “The process of renewal has to begin with a recognition of the moral dimension to what has happened.” Pay and bonus structures had led to excessive risk-taking in the banking industry. It was no longer acceptable to say that “if the law allows it, if regulations permit, then it must be OK.” Better risk management and regulation were necessary, he said. “But they are not sufficient without a culture of values.” He was particularly concerned about the “compensation structures” that encouraged short-termism and excessive risk-taking.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Carly Fiorina, former chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, says that business leaders “must be prepared to step up to new levels of transparency and accountability and to recalibrate our own role in an increasingly competitive world… In a fast-paced, hypercompetitive, technologically-driven world, common sense, good judgment and ethics matter more than ever.” Shareholders should be able to vote annually on “all aspects” of CEO’s pay and there should be “clawback provisions” requiring CEOs to “return compensation to shareholders if promised results aren’t delivered following their departure”. Moreover, “quarterly earnings and share price cannot be the singular purpose of business or metric of success for CEOs.” Businesses had an equal obligation to employees and customers as to shareholders and CEOs had to “balance the competing requirements of all these constituents”.

Then listen to the Oxford professor and columnist Timothy Garton-Ash. Writing in The Guardian (1 January 2009), he says that an “essential prise de conscience involves looking again at our personal lodestars. How much more in money and things do we need? Is enough as good as a feast?  Could we manage with less? What really matters to you? What contributes most to your individual happiness?” There are now, he points out, even whole academic studies on what constitutes happiness. (Denmark scores the highest in at least two rankings, and Canada scores over the USA.) Garton-Ash emphasises that “choices do come back to individual middle-class citizens of richer countries” if the planet is to sustain 6.7 billion people, let alone the nine billion projected world population by mid-century.

“We should be taking a hard look at the course we are steering,” he writes. “That requires leadership of a high order, but also citizens demanding such leadership. Would I personally be happy making the changes in my way of life would be necessary? Almost certainly not. But I’d at least like to know what they would be.”

His question focuses for us all on where the roots of personal satisfaction really lie.

One change would be for all of us to discover, or rediscover, conscience-based decision-making, instead of just being profit-driven. But this presupposes that we know on what basis our consciences are informed. Certainly not on the basis of what is profitable for me but rather on the basis of what is right for all of us. And “us” includes the future generations that will inherit and populate the planet, assuming we don’t destroy it in ecological disaster.

This requires a paradigm shift in thinking away from the great god Growth and towards the greater god of Sustainability. At the very least this means factoring in to the cost of production the hidden costs to the environment. And it means each of us consuming less now in order to conserve more for later—popularly also known as “delayed gratification”. But it also means making investment decisions that have nothing to do with immediate production or profit. It will be a new day, for instance, when corporations, and their shareholders, decide that they have an investment role in the preservation of the world’s rainforests, rather than their destruction for profit.

President Barak Obama and other enlightened politicians want governments to invest heavily in energy saving technology. There is talk of a “Green New Deal”, first proposed by the United Nations Environment Programme. Geoffrey Lean reports, in The Independent on Sunday (18 January), that President Obama wants to invest $150 billion in renewable energy, to ensure this provides a quarter of US electricity by 2025. In Britain, David Cameron’s policy document, The Low Carbon Economy, spells out hundreds of thousands of possible new jobs. The Tory leader wants to encourage house owners to install solar panels, including loans of up to £6,500 for energy improvements.

All this is seen as a great business opportunity. Whether or not it is a profitable one, we need a new global social market economy that is even more ecologically-driven than it is profit-driven—a new integrity-based, conscience-driven ecology economy. Perhaps then we could rest happy that we are leaving a safer legacy for future generations.

Michael Smith is the author of ‘Trust and Integrity in the Global Economy’ and a co-ordinator in the UK of Caux Initiatives for Business.