I think it's important to take a step back and understand what white balance is, and is not. It is not an inherent bias in your camera's sensor.
Light, as we experience it in the real world, has color. When white light bounces off or passes through a colored object, it picks up the color of that object (through discarding the remaining colors). On an overcast day, the light is more blue. In a fluorescent-lit office, it may be more green. Incandescent (tungsten) light is more yellow. The color of the light on a scene affects how the tones of that scene appear to the eye and to the camera. Putting yellow-orange light on someone's face for a portrait is flattering, for instance; lighting someone with greenish-blue light is not.
Generally when you shoot with a digital camera, you want to record the scene neutrally. If the scene is lit with green fluorescent tubes, everything and everyone in the room will have a greenish cast, which you may or may not see. You want to lift this veil of green so you can see the scene as it actually is. The auto white balance setting on your camera may pick up on this and adjust for it accordingly, but it may not. You can set the camera's white balance setting to an appropriate preset, or you can shoot a grey card and tell your RAW capture software to remove the color cast that it sees on the gray card (some cameras can also do this at the time of capture, like gavinlg was saying above).
Now back to your original question: is there a setting that gives the least software intervention to the white balance? Yes, theoretically the one that is the closest to the white balance of the scene in front of you, which may change from moment to moment. So, it is best to use the Auto white balance setting in most situations to let the camera decide the best white balance. You can change it easily in your post-processing if you notice that anything looks a bit "off," like skin tones not looking quite natural.
