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Ethics Paper

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Ethics Paper
Week 1 Assignment
Rheana Willis
01/08/2012

Dilemma
Choice 2: A married couple, both addicted to drugs, are unable to care for their infant daughter. She is taken from them by court order and placed in a foster home. The years pass. She comes to regard her foster parents as her real parents. They love her as they would their own daughter. When the child is 9 years old, the natural parents, rehabilitated from drugs, begin court action to regain custody. The case is decided in their favor. The child is returned to them, against her will. Does ethics support the law in this case? Discuss.

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of …show more content…

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 comfortable to move in with her real parents permanently. That would mean that both parents would have to set aside their differences for the sake of the child and work on having unity together. Applied ethics is, in the words of Brenda Almond, co-founder of the Society for Applied Philosophy, "the philosophical examination, from a moral standpoint, of particular issues in private and public life that are matters of moral judgment". It is thus a term used to describe attempts to use philosophical methods to identify the morally correct course of action in various fields of human life. Applied ethics is distinguished from normative ethics, which concerns what people should believe to be right and wrong, and from meta-ethics, which concerns the nature of moral statements. Morally in this situation when using applied ethics, you solve the dilemma by act-utilitarianism. If raising their child on their own without involving the foster parents produces greater benefit than disbenefit, then, according to act-utilitarianism, it would be morally acceptable to do so, even if the child has been raised by them the first nine years of her life.

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