Twenty multinational companies were analysed in 10 major sectors with the top 10 performing companies ranked in each category in the research produced by ethical monitoring organisation Covalence.
Overall, leading the most ethical brands was Unilever with aluminium company Aloca and Starbucks coming second and third respectively.
However, in a good week for M&S, the UK retailer was named as making the best ethical progress followed by US retail giant Wal-Mart and DuPont.
Earlier this week, market research firm Millward Brown named M&S as the fastest-growing brand earlier this week. Its global position was 68 and it came fourth in the UK rankings behind Vodafone, Tesco and HSBC which came first, second and third respectively.
In the automobile sector, the most ethical brand was named Toyota in score and progress, with Ford coming second in both categories.
In the banking sector, HSBC again took the two top spots. In the food and beverage stakes, Unilever scored highest across each ranking.
McDonald's was named as the brand making most progress in the leisure and entertainment industry and ranked fifth overall. It comes as the fast food giant launches a PR and marketing effort to combat the launch of 'Fast Food Nation', Richard Linklater's dramatised movie version of Eric Schlosser's book about fast food. Philips was named most ethical organisation in this ranking.
Covalence's ethical quotation system based its finding on quantifying qualitative data, which was classified according to 45 criteria of business contribution to human development such as labour standards, waste management and human rights policy.
It compiled thousands of documents found among media, enterprise and other sources to produce the ethical quote curves.