JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, recently agreed to pay a $13 billion fine to settle charges of selling bad mortgage-backed securities, which contributed to the collapse of the housing market, which cascaded into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

IBM, the world’s fourth most-valuable brand, according to Forbes magazine, recently decided to kick some 110,000 of its retirees off the company-sponsored health plan, paying its former workers to find their own health insurance.

Village Voice Media, owners of Backpage.com, the nation’s second-largest Internet classified ad listing service, recently was called out by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for enabling child sex trafficking.

The regrettable practices of such corporations as JPMorgan Chase, IBM and Village Voice Media do much to reinforce the perception of many Americans that big business is “all about the bucks,” while “the rest is conversation,” to borrow a quote from Gordon Gekko, the fictional greenmailer in the movie “Wall Street.”

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, is no Gordon Gekko. And the company he co-founded 35 years ago doesn’t bilk investors, doesn’t mistreat its past or present employees (it has been ranked one of the “100 Best companies to Work For” 16 straight years), and doesn’t enable criminal enterprise.

That’s because Whole Foods, the nation’s leading retailer of natural and organic foods, practices what Mackey terms “conscious capitalism,” the tenets of which are laid out in a best-selling book he co-authored, which was published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Conscious capitalism is the key to long term competiveness, Mackey posited. And to put it in practice, he said, “a business needs to have discovered its higher purpose” and “it needs to adopt a stakeholder philosophy.”

He elaborated in a HBR podcast earlier this year.

“If,” he said, “you ask what the purpose of a doctor is, no one answers that question by saying, ‘Well, the purpose of doctors is to maximize profits,’” No, he continued, “obviously, the purpose of doctors is to heal people.”

The same goes for teachers, journalists and other professions, he said.

“Only business people answer (that) the purpose of business is to make money,” said Mackey. But “every business has the potential for some other higher purpose besides just making money.”

That’s not to say that corporations shouldn’t endeavor to grow their business, to generate profits for their shareholders, Mackey said.

But companies that practice conscious capitalism balance the interests of all their stakeholders. Not just a company’s investors, but also its employees, its customers and the communities in which the company has a footprint.

Now some might think Mackey a squishy capitalist, who would be more at home running a nonprofit food bank than running a $13 billion food retailer with more than 350 high-end grocery stores.

But Mackey is as much a capitalist as the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, IBM and Village Voice Media. It’s just that he’s operating out of a different playbook.

Indeed, Mackey studied philosophy and religion. He started reading the writings of “free-market thinkers and economists,” including Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard and Adam Smith. And he developed a “new world view,” which he considers libertarian.

While most capitalists pay homage to Smith, who famously authored “The Wealth of Nations,” Mackey laments that “Smith’s ideas on empathy and care and compassion for others was just ignored.”

Had Smith’s ethical philosophy been synthesized into his economic philosophy, said Mackey, “the world might be, probably would be, a very different place today.”

Indeed, there would be fewer companies defrauding investors; fewer companies dumping past or present employees off the company health plan; fewer companies aiding and abetting sex trafficking and other crimes.

There would be more companies like Whole Foods, which practices conscious capitalism, which just celebrated “the best fiscal year performance” in its history, which has done well in the marketplace by doing good.