So-called socially responsible investors like to do well but also to do good. Even in wretched markets like these that test the resolve of all investors, they remain committed to dispensing their funds to meet ethical as well as purely pecuniary objectives. At any rate, that is the considered opinion of Howard Carter, who runs Europe's biggest SRI fund manager, U.K.-based Isis Asset Management.

Thus the 51-year-old, Yorkshire-born CEO had no hesitation last month in publishing Isis' first "green" league table of European banks: those, like Barclays, Credit Suisse Group and Lloyds TSB, that take environmental considerations into account in making corporate loans and those, like Santander, UniCredito and Société Générale, that basically don't, or don't do so enough. Carter has threatened to sell those bad banks' shares. This "nuclear option," he notes, already applies to nonfinancial companies that don't make progress in human rights and environmental protection.

Isis, just three months old, grew out of the merger of Friends Ivory & Sime and the fund management arm of insurer Royal & SunAlliance. In the two years since Carter took over at FIS, he has proved that social responsibility can pay, even in tough times: The firm's SRI assets have grown from less than £2 billion ($3.1 billion) to £17.7 billion. And with the July 1 acquisition of Royal & SunAlliance, the combined firm more than doubled its total assets, to £66 billion.

"We as a group would not be nearly as well known without the social responsibility link," says Carter.