Focus of the program: Is business doing enough? Can it -- should it -- do more?

"We intend to give these issues a new dimension of visibility, recognition, and impetus," says John Paluszek, senior counsel at Ketchum, executive producer and the host of the "Business In Society" programs.

The program's March 30th series premiere features Mr. Georg [Gay-org] Kell, executive director of the United Nations Global Compact, the world's largest voluntary sustainability network with over 7,000 corporate members operating in accord with UNGC principles in environment, human rights, labor rights and transparency. UNGC also has some 3500 academic, non-governmental-organizations (NGOs) and governments in its membership.

You can view the first program here:

How much is enough?

That was a central question John Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group, posed several years ago about Wall Street. It is also an underlying question in Arbitrage, Nicholas Jarecki’s recently released film.

Richard Gere plays Richard Miller, a billionaire hedge fund manager whose greater cause is seeing himself as the orbit point of the universe. He is driven in equal measure by greed and power, wrapped in the self-conceived nobility of doing it all for his family.

When his very risky financial, business and personal decisions backfire in disastrous consequences that he continues to play out, his defiant responses lack remorse, self-reflection, or apology:

“What am I supposed to do?”….”Did you want me to let our investors go bankrupt?”….”I did what was necessary.”….”Everything I do is for us….”

In an interview, director Jarecki said he wanted Gere’s character to reflect an Aristotelian tragic hero: a good man who became corrupted, who read too many of his own press releases.

Wall Street doesn’t have the market corned on megalomania. We’ve witnessed it in politics and any profession when an individual believes he is entitled to write his or her own rules without accountability to consequences.

However public trust in banks and big business remains at an all-time low, not rebounding from the financial crisis. Gallup’s Confidence in Institutions poll this summer indicated that only 21 percent surveyed trust banks and big business a great deal/quite a lot, compared with 63 percent who said that about their trust in small businesses.

Movies like The Inside Job and Margin Call merely reflect what the public experienced, saw, heard or read about the financial meltdown that contributed to its losing trust.

The issue of how much is enough is directly tied to trust. It is a question we have yet to answer.

In Arbitrage, Miller’s wife asks the billionaire, “How much money do we need? Do you want to be the richest guy in the cemetery?” For  Miller, there is no limit to the amount needed because it is spent faster than it is made. The end justifies the means in the endless pursuit to obtain more.

Bogle wrote in his 2008 book Enough: The True Measures of Money, Business and Life that “Central to the effective functioning of early capitalism was the fundamental principle of trusting and being trusted.”

As an aside, Bogle might take heart from the Conscious Capitalism movement, which promotes profit and creating “multiple kinds of wealth and well being” that have a positive impact on society and inspire public trust.

Bogle’s book grew out of a 2007 commencement speech he delivered to Georgetown University MBA graduates. He asked them to consider “the role of ‘enough’ in business.” He admonished the graduates: “It is said on Wall Street, correctly, that ‘money has no conscience,’ but don’t allow that truism to let you ignore your own conscience nor to alter your own conduct and character.”

Arbitrage’s Miller can’t be trusted — seduced by his own sense of omnipotence, blind to his impact on others, he is driven by the belief there is never enough.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a consultant, executive coach, and presenter focused on building leadership, trust, and reputation. She publishes the The Week in Ethics, where this column originally appeared.

Consider the case of MF Global Holdings Ltd., a New York-based securities firm that filed for bankruptcy protection on Oct. 31 after disclosing sizable exposure to derivatives and other investments related to billions of dollars in European sovereign debt. The firm was headed by Jon S. Corzine, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs who was subsequently elected U.S. Senator and, later, Governor of New Jersey.  After losing his gubernatorial re-election campaign to Chris Christie in 2009, Corzine returned to banking as CEO of MF Global.

In this video clip, “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart compares and contrasts the positions and behavior of Jon S. Corzine, the politician, with Jon S. Corzine, the banker.

Weighing in on the topic on Fox Television in the U.S. last night was The Simpsons, one of the most successful series in the history of the medium.  In an opening credit sequence created by street artist Banksy, the animated family is portrayed as racing home to view their own program on TV.

What they see is a grim depiction of a supply chain for The Simpsons, with animation cels of the series made by hundreds of Asian workers in a dark rat-filled factory.  A child laborer dips the cels by hand into a vat of dangerous-looking chemicals.  Animals are thrown into a wood chipper to create stuffing for Bart Simpson dolls.  DVDs of the series are made with the help of an imprisoned unicorn.  The sequence closes with a gloomy credit to Twentieth Century Fox.

According to the Guardian, artist Banksy was said to have been inspired by reports that Simpsons characters are animated in Seoul, South Korea. Al Jeans, executive producer of the series, reportedly joked: "This is what you get when you outsource."

Jeffrey Hollender, Co-founder & CEO of Seventh Generation, tells Big Think:

Tal Ben-Shahar is an author and lecturer at Harvard University. He currently teaches the largest course at Harvard on "Positive Psychology" and the third largest on "The Psychology of Leadership"--with a total of over 1,400 students.