(FORTUNE Magazine) – Can business be profitable while helping to create a better world? Can executives be socially responsible while attending to the bottom line? Folks who insist on raising these portentous questions invariably want you to think that (a) the answer is yes but (b) golly, it sure is hard to find examples. Take the Business Enterprise Trust, set up two years ago to address those questions. Attesting to the posited high importance and awesome difficulty of identifying suitable exemplars, the trust is headed by such corporate eminences as James E. Burke (Johnson & Johnson) and Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), has a staff headed by Stanford professor and ''ethicist'' Kirk Hanson -- or so he gets labeled in news stories -- and has PR firms on both coasts. On March 21, BET was scheduled to make its awards at ceremonies emceed by Barbara Walters. Our own awards reflect a different perspective. We claim the world is improved every day of the year by normal, profit-seeking business behavior unaided (and unlauded) by ethicists. We also claim to have thought up our winners in 15 minutes: -- George W. Edwards Jr. of United Illuminating Co., for fighting off environmental fanatics and getting the Seabrook nuclear power plant into operation. -- Rupert Murdoch, who saved a significant fraction of the British press by showing that you could print papers without unions. -- Matsushita Electric, which keeps trying to sell Americans computer screens below cost. (Before griping about this one, look up the FORTUNE story of May 5, 1980, called ''Why Dumping Is Good for Us.'') -- Hasbro Inc., whose G.I. Joe toys helped a generation of American boys grow up thinking positively of military careers. -- Kellogg Co., for years of Saturday morning cartoon shows that enabled parents of 6-year-olds to get a little sleep. They left a better world.