I'm teaching an "Engagement" class here at UVA entitled "The ethical state of the world" this semester, and one of my points is that "ethics" has now become an issue that has infiltrated parts of our world, parts on which a concern with "ethics" never had an explicit idiomatic purchase before.  Among other things, we are increasingly ethical consumers; we've all seen ethical messages communicated on coffee cups at Starbucks, for instance.  (There are many more examples of this; I'll come back to it in later posts.)  It was only a matter of time before all sorts of economic forces got into the act, and this leads to interesting phenomena like the one discussed in this article.  This speaks to the changing way an interest in ethics can be communicated, and in what it does for a company's bottom line and its consumers' sense of themselves.  Interesting times.  (And no I won't be assigning this piece in my class, don't worry; I can only imagine the distortions that might happen if the media were to trumpet this.)