A shareholder question to Goldman Sachs (GS) chief Lloyd Blankfein gets to the heart of the recent financial crisis and the fears that another meltdown is in store: how to define excessive risk.

Blankfein suggests that even before the collapse of the financial sector in 2008, Goldman was set up better than its rivals to deal with risk, because its top managers are so involved in the business and because the firm’s risk managers are independent of its traders.

“We have a lot of analytic measures,” Blankfein says. He goes on to put in his usual two cents about how all the risks Goldman takes make society better, etc. etc.

For once, someone takes issue with this nonsense, pointing out that black box trading and the massive growth of derivatives were part of the problem that led to the 2008 collapse. Cathy Rowan of Maryknoll Sisters, a socially responsible investor in Westchester County, N.Y., that is sponsoring a proposal that would cause Goldman to increase its derivatives disclosure, notes that a “fair and just financial system is a moral imperative.”

Goldman, needless to say, opposes the proposal, contending it has “complex and detailed policies that could not meaningfully be reduced to a single ‘policy’ regarding collateral as requested by this proposal.” Of course they couldn’t.