Child Abuse

In this scenario, a child who was born to drug-addicted parents is placed into foster care. The child is taken in by a loving set of parents and grows up to regard these parents as her real, true parents. When the child is nine, however, the parents have been rehabilitated from the drug addiction and ask to re-obtain custody. They win the court case, in large part due to the children being in foster care rather than adopted, and the child is returned to them. The child, however, does not want to return to her birth parents and would prefer to stay with her foster parents, who she regards as her true parents.

This scenario is mostly interesting because it introduces the conflicting conclusions of ethics based on multiple participants. In this scenario, there are three major participants: the daughter, the birth parents, and the foster parents. This scenario is particularly interesting to examine from the perspective of ends-based ethics in contrast with rule-based ethics. Briefly, ends-based ethical believe that the most moral decision is the one that has the best total overall outcome when all effects are summed together. In this instance, this would involve combining the effect of the decision on the daughter, the foster parents, and the birth parents. Rule-based ethics, on the other hand, believes that rather than evaluating all situations separately, it is better to come up with absolute rules that govern decision making, believing that following those rules will lead to the greatest overall outcomes even if some individual situations lead to unwanted outcomes.

The ends-based viewpoint would likely hold that the daughter should be allowed to stay with her foster parents. Consider the ends for the birth parents, foster parents, and child. For the birth parents, gaining custody of their child means likely their happiness as measured by some metric, while the loss of custody of the child leads to some unhappiness for the foster parents. This is an equal...