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AN ETHICAL ANALYSIS OF NICOTINE NON-HIRING PRACTICES: SHOULD THIS POLICY BE SNUFFED OUT?
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2025-08
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Urban Bioethics
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https://doi.org/10.34944/73j1-v050
Abstract
The deleterious health impacts of smoking are well established—but unemployment is bad for health too. In this article, I evaluate the ethics of nicotine non-hiring practices (NNPs) and use analogies to other health behaviors (obesity and alcohol use) to better examine the policy. First, I considered arguments for NNPs. The most popular is that NNPs drive down smoking rates among employees and the general public. There are multiple plausible mechanisms to do so—however, I was unable to find any convincing empirical data supporting these hypotheses. I also argue that the reasons to avoid discrimination on the basis of protected classes (to promote societal cohesion, uphold equal individual moral worth and mitigate long-standing systemic harms) are insufficient to prevent NNPs. Finally, I discuss that for optimal functioning of a liberal democracy, organizations have the right to choose who they wish to hire. Hence, it requires a significant ethical harm to prevent hiring on the basis of nicotine use.
Therefore, I next consider arguments that critique NNPs. I highlight three harms by NNPs as particularly strong. NNPs erode personal autonomy by taking away choice for individuals. However, this paternalism may be warranted by the seriousness of smoking as a public health threat and the insufficiency of less restrictive interventions in helping smokers who want to quit to do so successfully. NNPs also violate the privacy of individuals, though this is less compelling as nicotine use is linked to inferior job performance (beyond merely increasing healthcare costs) and therefore nicotine use seems relevant to the hiring process. Finally, NNPs concentrate their harms (or at least their paternalism) in disadvantaged groups which raises significant justice concerns.
Overall, I find nicotine non-hiring practices to be ethically permissible, though they are ethically fragile policies whose legitimacy depends on empirical justification, sensitive implementation, and continued scrutiny. I generalize this analysis to produce a set of criteria for when a hiring policy might ethically consider health-related behavior.
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