There are a couple of telling quotes in the series of recent movies about the masked crusader with the sticky hands

It's almost become a corporate responsibility cliche. Powerpoint presentations (yawn) with the quote "with great power comes great responsibility".

It's a line from the wise grey-haired 'Uncle Ben' character in the first Spider-Man film from a few years ago.

Since then its appeared in countless talks and articles in the world of ethical business.

It's not a bad truism, but it's much less useful than a quote from the third film in the series, which, being totally up to date, I just recently watched, ages after it came out.

The quote goes something like "we are defined by the choices we make", which sounds a bit more thought provoking to me.

In a way this shift from the basic in the first film, released in 2002, to the more nuanced in the third, out five years later, mirrors the development of the responsible business, or corporate ethics movement, call it what you will.

What blather do I speak? Well, if you think about it, back in the "early days" of modern CSR, the debate was all a bit basic really.

We had books like David Korten's "When Corporations Rule the World" in 1995, (foreword by Danny Glover, who thinks Hugo Chavez is a great leader) and then Naomi Klein's overblown rhetoric in "No Logo" about five years later. (her latest is not much better, click here for a podcast on it and here for our review of her 2007 tome).

These books were powerful, but hugely simplistic. Symbols of a time when globalisation as it is today had not really taken hold and everyone was into easy answers like "General Motors is 'bigger' then Denmark, lets do something", or "bad labour standards are clearly all Nike's fault".

(Interestingly, James Kynge in "China Shakes the World" says that China's really only arrived on the global stage as a serious international economic actor as late as 2004 or so).

Anyhow, this early shrillness about what we now are starting to call corporate sustainability has parallels to that first Spider-Man film line about "with great power comes great responsibility".

They were relatively simple, as was the advice proferred by sage uncle Ben to the wall climbing arachnid bitten hero of my childhood.

By the time 2007's Spider-Man line of "we are defined by the choices we make" comes along, the CSR world has moved a huge distance too.

The quote is telling with regard where some big companies are today, at least the smart and well managed big ones, and it ought to be how the rest of society looks at business ethics.

We have choices, companies have choices, and these have consequences. Each set of consequences requires evaluation in advance so that the likely impacts can be assessed. Simple stuff, really.

For example, a couple of years ago, many of us (including myself, briefly) thought that biofuels might be a half decent fossil fuels panacea. Hmm, how wrong we were. Sure they are part of the mix, but that's as good as they get.

Then take nuclear, around which a massive global debate is taking place. Turns out the costs of all these new plants might be better used in other ways (like, oh, I don't know, insulation).

Then there's fairtrade/organic cotton, great idea, lets do it. Only, damn, there's not enough of it, and in the case of organics, there never can be. We'd need to use land needed for food and people to do so.

What I mean by all this that these debates above are about choices, and consequences. Ultimately they are about decisions around trade offs, and which of these might work best for a sustainable (or more sustainable) world.

So there you have it. Spider-Man, as well as being the coolest super hero (Batman doesn't count, since he was just a real bloke with technology, he didn't have special powers), is maturing too, and offering us in that last film, a single line that ought to give us all some pause for thought.