“I’m not the most ethical person . . . I mean, I’m not the highest-scoring person I know . . . and I always put my hands up when I’m talking about this [ethics] and say I’m divorced and remarried, and all the rest of it, so . . .”

Roger Steare, corporate philosopher and Professor of Organisational Ethics at Cass Business School in the City, admits that he does not know the answers to the tough moral questions that he wants us all to consider.

Professor Steare, who conducted the survey of the ethical make-up of more than 20,000 Times Online readers, wants us all “to stop and think” about our values and those that we want for society.

“What is going wrong in the world is our collective responsibility. This credit crunch is not just about a bunch of greedy, short-selling hedge fund managers; it is a collective responsibility. Either we have been happy to take the cheap credit when it is there, or we did not do enough, or we did not care. “ I think that one of the things that I would love people to do is to stop and think about this: ‘I may not have pushed the button on the screen to sell HBOS shares, but really and truly am I glad that my pension fund took a short position on HBOS and made money because I’m going to retire in ten years?’

“I think we all need to say there are shades of evil but we are all responsible for it and there is that beast, that dark side in all of us, and what we need to be doing is really thinking about, not what should you do but what I must do, as a consequence.”

Professor Steare does not shy away from tough situations in his personal life, either. He and his wife Jane, the mother of Lucie Blackman, who was murdered in Japan eight years ago, have found that a strong sense of ethical integrity has helped them to deal with the hard times. The couple turned down “condolence payments” from a Japanese businessman “without hesitation”.

“We have all got crap in our lives, there is all sorts of stuff we have to deal with. We need to be able to stop and think about how we ought to respond to this, what is important in our lives, so that we can do what is right.”

Professor Steare describes himself as a maverick and is animated and passionate about the need to fix society’s problems. He would not look out of place in a pulpit. The son of a Methodist preacher, he attributes his evangelical drive to the “strong Christian moral code” and “tough love” of his upbringing and the experiences garnered through a chequered career.

On graduating in History of Western Philosophy from London University, he joined a graduate programme at a retail bank, an experience he describes as “slow death”. After two years he left to become a residential social worker with adolescents in West London - “That gave me my MBA in life”. Three years later he left, “burnt out and broke”, to become a City headhunter. “I went from dealing with deliquents with nothing to dealing with deliquents with too much.”

It was as a headhunter that he began to question people’s ethical beliefs. “I’d ask candidates to tell me: ‘What are your values as a human being?’ And their response told me everything I needed to know about them.” Six years ago he left to become a self-employed careers adviser and coach. His interest in ethical research arose from meeting an abbot on a management training course. They later wrote a paper for the Financial Services Authority on integrity.

“The last six years has been a lonely, rocky road. People [in the City] have said to me: ‘I think what you are doing is really valuable, but not now. We have got more important things to do.”

Yet his time may, finally, have come. “This economic meltdown and demographic growth are symptoms of a greater fundamental problem - in that we want more than we need. What is wrong with just saying: ‘I have enough, thank you?’ I’m not saying that I’ve got the answers, I’m trying to find the answers for my life, but I think that we need to stop listening to people who tell us how to fix this, think about our own personal values and learn to fix it for ourselves.”

What to do next

Take the test: find out the composition of your moral DNA - Are you an enforcer, philosopher, judge, angel, teacher or guardian?

Get the report: the full results of the survey are detailed in a report, Who’s doing the right thing? written by Roger Steare and his colleague Pavlos Stamboulides.

Read the book: Ethicability by Roger Steare. Price £20.

All at: www.ethicability.org

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