Married Couple with Kids and Addicted to Drugs

Married Couple with Kids and Addicted to Drugs

Patrick Garcia

DeVry University

Principles of Ethics

Professor Lisa Smith

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior. Major branches of ethics include: Meta-ethics, about the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions and how their truth values (if any) may be determined; Normative ethics, about the practical means of determining a moral course of action; Applied ethics, about how moral outcomes can be achieved in specific situations; Within each of these branches are many different schools of thought and still further sub-fields of study.

For this particular dilemma I chose Normative ethics and Applied ethics to solve and clarify the decision making process. Normative ethics is the study of ethical action. It is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates the set of questions that arise when considering how one ought to act, morally speaking. Normative ethics is distinct from meta-ethics because it examines standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, while meta-ethics studies the meaning of moral language and the metaphysics of moral facts. Normative ethics is also distinct from descriptive ethics, as the latter is an empirical investigation of people’s moral beliefs. To put it another way, descriptive ethics would be concerned with determining what proportion of people believe that killing is always wrong, while normative ethics is concerned with whether it is correct to hold such a belief. Hence, normative ethics is sometimes said to be prescriptive, rather than descriptive. Using this method of choice to solve this dilemma would mean that both the foster parents and the rehabilitated parents would have to come up with an agreement in which the child is seeing both her real parents and her foster parents until she is...