This paper examines economic arguments employers sometimes use to justify restricting or excluding from employment those workers who are likely to incur high costs in health care insurance. We argue that, although profit-making is a legitimate goal for businesses, hiring practices based on non-job-related criteria violate principles of self determination, autonomy, discrimination, justice, and privacy. We conclude that hiring practices based on liability-driven ethics are not morally justified, but that as long as health care insurance and employment are linked, businesses will continue to have an incentive to use liability-driven arguments.

I begin by recounting the market demands that created an opportunity for me to teach business ethics in the College of Business at St. Cloud State University. The AACSB and my educational institution focused amorphous social demands for better business practices into a specific demand for a philosophy Ph.D. to teach business ethics. I felt frustrated teaching business ethics because of my inexperience and the eclectic nature of the field. I, and many others, searched for something to unify the many topics of the field. This search was one of the factors that led to BEQ’s appearance in 1991. The first issue marked a milestone in the continuing search for theory and the legitimization of the field. It focused previous discussions and was remarkably prescient. While it is unlikely that we will reach a consensus about how to understand the field, if consensus ever comes close to occurring, I argue that it will not coalesce over stakeholder theory. I examine two theories that could be used as a grand unified theory (GUT) of business ethics: Integrated Social Contracts Theory and my own institutional theory that expands on the work of Douglass North’s view of economic institutions. I use the discussion of these GUTs to develop criteria of what a successful GUT might look like. Based on these criteria, I argue that the institutional theory has a better chance of succeeding, but recognize that business ethics GUTs are primarily heuristic; many different types of theories can be helpful. Lastly, I discuss whether it is pretentious and overbearing to argue for a GUT. I argue that it need not be.

For those who, like myself, are enthusiastic advocates of normativelydriven empirical studies of business ethics and values, a display of expert knowledge concerning methods of the sort we see here is occasion for large measures of professional satisfaction. With all of their imperfections and qualifications, all of the tentativeness attached to the truths they yield, these methods (and similar others not included here) open vistas not accessible by other modes of inquiry. For these gains, scholars everywhere should be grateful.

Yet, questions nag at the back of one's mind, even as the positive accomplishments are registered.

I am foregoing the discussant’s critical role in favor of a short examination of how one sociologist’s imagination is tantalized and irritated by some of the ideas and interconnections of Professor Messick’s paper. The question is, when it comes to ingroups and outgroups, why does race matter? Why does sex or gender matter? I will briefly make four points about sociobiology, favoritism toward the ingroup, hostility toward the outgroup, and finally, the conflict theorist’s favorite topic — resource allocation.