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22 Most Ethical Companies in the US

Habib Ur Rehman
9 min read

In This Article:

In this article, we discuss the 22 most ethical companies in the US. You can skip our detailed analysis of the free market as it pertains to ethical conduct in the US and go directly to 5 Most Ethical Companies in the US. 

Young people are becoming increasingly awake to the social, historical, climate and financial injustices and choose to give business to, and invest in companies that share their values. Many corporations have responded positively to the development. 

“Ethical” Capitalism

To give you a quantitative perspective on the corporate ethical turn, Yale School of Management has compiled a list of 138 corporations with extended women’s benefits, not offered by other corporations. 

Out of these, nearly a third are tech corporations. The most prominent ones are Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN). 

In terms of doing business in Russia, over a 1,000 corporations (majority of them American) have left the country after it invaded the neighboring Ukraine. Evidence indicates that the equity market’s reward to the companies for the action far outweighs the potential loss from leaving Russia. On the other hand, companies that are still engaged in business with Russia are being punished by investors. 

At the sustainability front, many companies have adopted “planet friendly” policies to lower the burden on Earth’s ecosystem and climate. However, most of the corporate sector has been called out several times for “greenwashing” and not actually doing enough. Regardless, the companies we’ve discussed are doing their part for sustainability as well as social and financial justice. 

ESG’s Impact on a Company’s Financial Performance

ESG refers to the Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance. It's a set of standards that impact-investors look at when investing based on values. 

Stern School of Business carried out a meta-analysis of a 1,000 studies on ESG, done between the period of 2015-2020, and concluded that ESG and corporate financial performance had a statistically significant positive correlation for 58% of the studies. The analysis also discovered that corporate investments in sustainability were actually advantageous in the long-term while having no impact on financial performance in the short-term.

Now that we have the perspective on the ethical free market, let’s move on to the list of 22 most ethical companies in the US. 

22 Most Ethical Companies in the US
22 Most Ethical Companies in the US

Photo by Feri & Tasos on Unsplash

Our Methodology

For our list of the 22 most ethical companies in the US, we’ve ranked them based on how many times they’ve been hailed as honorees for being ethical up until 2022 by Ethisphere Institute, a global leader in assessing ethical businesses.

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