What Might Be Fair

With respect to those "home-smokers", who wish to work at a company with a non-smoking policy. It seems to me that the fair solution would be the following:

• Smoking is a health risk. Smokers do have higher health costs.
• As such, since in our current system, the employer provided medical (and often some life) insurance, it seems fair that an employer desiring to hire from the pool of non-smoking workers should not be required to bear the burden of increased health insurance costs from this higher risk pool.
• Therefore the "fair" solution might be for the worker to bear the higher costs himself.
• In that way neither the larger pool of non-smoking workers nor the employer will be asked to shoulder the costs due to voluntary high risk behavior of a few.

What this doesn't discuss are the moral and ethical issues involved with privacy and liberty. Again, I will defer that to a later essay.