Abstract

Biology, during the last decade in particular, is making substantial headway into our social theories of business and behavior. While the social sciences rush to keep up with the advancement of knowledge, we highlight the need for an ethics discussion to also keep pace. Although the implications to theory are important, our focus is on how new knowledge has the capacity to alter the formulation and practice of business policy, which we believe is potentially profound. Furthermore, the ethicality of a set of issues can depend heavily on one’s perspective, and differing views may not always be compatible. With this in mind, we discuss the ways in which one area of emerging biological knowledge—behavioral genetics—invites a rethinking of the nuances of four long-standing topic areas of business ethics surrounding personnel selection; and we do so from two perspectives—that of the employer and of the job seeker. The four ethical topics are the static nature of genetic information that is out of an individual’s control, faking and lying during selection processes, privacy, and stigmatization of minority groups.