well I think the "choice" part is about the choice to do drugs or not. You don't have to do them (and will test negative on a urine test) and can thus get a job. I guess I don't think an employer requesting a person submit to an "illegal" (at the fed level) drug test in order to get hired for a job as unethical.
The only reason a drug test is plausibly relevant to an employer is where it determines that someone is actively intoxicated and thus unfit to do their job.
Not neccessarily. They aren't testing to see if you are currently intoxicated, they are testing to see if you are or recently have been taking illegal substances and thus engaging in an illegal activity and thus a person that they would not want to employ. Employers look at many things including criminal records, credit scores, etc... that have nothing what so ever to do with your job at all. They look at those to see if you are a trustworthy upstanding person. Some jobs require polygraphs and the questions asked don't have to do with your work-related skills, they evaluate your character. To me that is what drug testing is for.
The idea that my "character" is any of my job's business (outside of my ability to do a good job) is ridiculous. If I don't do a good job, fire me. Otherwise, searching for irrelevant "character flaws" in evaluating one for employment sounds like a way for corporations to pretend that they are somehow some kind of moral authority-ha!
So if you were hiring someone to watch your child or clean your house or work in your business you wouldn't care what they've done in the past and only about their job related skills? You wouldn't call a former employer and ask about their character - whether they were honest and dedicated or if they had some sort of red-flags on the job (temper, aggression, tardiness, slothfulness, stealing, etc...)? You wouldn't look at their facebook pages, their credit history, their criminal record? You'd just "trust" that, based only on their qualifications, they would be a good employee?
Why do people keep asking about nannies? But, okay...no. No, I don't care about pretending I'm an arbitrator of the character of someone who works for me, beyond it directly affecting their job. All I would ask about calling a previous employer would be how good of a job they did. I would file a nanny who had a temper, was aggressive, tardy, etc as not having done a good job. I would not care if she smoked pot on her time off, liked to speed in her car in her time off, lied on her taxes, had a lot of credit card debt, had affairs with married men, made a duck face in her facebook photos, etc. And I sure as fuck wouldn't look at her facebook page (don't like looking at the facebook pages of most of my friends, certainly don't care about hers).
I do not believe that people are as simple as have "good" or "bad" character. The reality is that given the exact same circumstances, the vast majority of us would do the exact same thing. Almost all people cheat/break the rules a little when given the chance, but stay within the range where they can still justify their behavior to themselves as moral (see work by Dan Ariely). The big difference is that depending on culture, background, socioeconomic norms, sometimes this rule breaking is seen as withing the guidelines of acceptable within groups (eg., men sleeping with anyone who'll "let them," drinking, speeding) and sometimes not seen as acceptable in mainstream groups (eg., women acting "slutty", doing crack, not bathing daily).
Oh, and Boom! 500 posts.