We live increasingly under conditions of globally and systemically engendered insecurity and uncertainty where the the emphasis is on consumer freedom and individual responsibility in a postmodern world of fluid and fragmentary social bonds and individual identity. Does this suggest a new ethical landscape in which we live?

In some ways yes. Postmodern life has become privatised in the sense of our everyday lives and concerns making us more concerned with our own space and less willing to make commitments. Privatisation in a consumer society means the escape from the constraints and bonds of community. So ethics increasingly rests with the individual with his or her choices rather than the old certainties of yesteryear.

Zygmunt Bauman takes up these themes in Alone Again Ethics After Certainty published by Demos

He makes these comments about bureaucracy and business in modernity:

Bureaucracy strangles or criminalises moral impulses,while business merely pushes them aside. Horrified by the totalitarian tendencies Horrified by the totalitarian tendencies ingrained in every bureaucracy, Orwell sounded an alarm against the prospect of ‘the boot eternally trampling a human face’. An apt metaphor for the business variety of morality-bashing would be perhaps ‘the blinkers eternally preventing the human face from being seen’. The short-term consequences for people exposed to one or the other of the two strategies may be starkly different, yet the long-term results are quite similar: taking moral issues off the agenda, sapping the moral autonomy of the acting subject, undermining the principle of moral responsibility for the effects, however distant and indirect, of one’s deeds. Neither modern. organization nor modern business promotes morality; if anything, they make the life of a stubbornly moral person tough and unrewarding. (p.16)