Custody Of A Child Case Study

“Custody of a Child”
Principle of Ethics
Professor John Becker

Custody of a Child In the United States there are a high number of children that are placed in foster care due the parents being inadequate to care for their own children as was the case for the parents of a 9 year old little girl who was taken from her parents when she was a baby. She was put in the care of foster parents who in time became the real parents of this child. After many years of rehabilitation however, the biological parents of this 9 year old girl became clean and began the process of regaining custody of the child and won their case. As a result the 9 year old girl gets returned to her biological parents against her will. Let’s look
at the two different ways that this issue can be solved, which are the ends-based method and care-based method. From a care-based point of view, this is the right decision made by the court.
This method follows the golden rule, which is: Do unto others what you would like them to do to you. If this 9 year old girl gets returned to her biological parents, who deserve the right to be with her because they gave birth to her, both mother and father are going to strive to stay clean and sober so they can be good parents and set a good example for their daughter. Having this child with them might be the only reason they decided to become sober in the first place. Therefore, there are less drug addicts in the world. What if because the child is still young, she might later on in life resent her foster parents for not giving her the right to be a part of her biological parent’s lives, which is common in cases like these. If you were the biological parents, wouldn’t you want a second chance or don’t you think you deserve a second chance, after all no one is
perfect. Now let’s examine this from a utilitarianism perspective.
In this method the decision made by court is not the proper one. Let us stop and think about what this 9 year old girl thinks. She wants to stay with her foster parents because after all she was raised with them and has come to love and appreciate everything that they have done for her over the past 9 years. It is not fair to her that after she had to be put in foster care because her biological parents were drug addicts and could not care for her, now she is taken away from the parents she now believes are her real parents. What if after a year or two her biological parents fall back into drugs and she, again, has to be put in the foster care? Which would be more painful? And if this were to happen how will this girl benefit? Where would she end up if this became a cycle for the biological parents and she has to be put back into foster care? What example would they be giving their daughter? What if after several years, she herself falls into the same pattern as them, and then all we would have accomplished is that this 9 year old girl, who could have stayed with her foster parents, is now also a drug addict just like her biological parents. Lastly and most importantly, what would be the greater good and greater number, to have 2 drug addict parents or to have a family of drug addicts that could have been avoided if the 9 year old girl would have stayed in a place where she felt safe, a place where she
felt her foster parents were her real parents, despite their DNA, a place called home. There is one similarity, in my opinion, to both of these methods. They are both striving to the get to the greater good. However, the greater good for one method is different than the other. One method has shown above is more concentrated on the better good of the biological parents and their sobriety in the long run, which is the end-based method. The other method, care-based, concentrated their attention more on this 9 year old little girl that wants to stay with her foster parents because over the years they have become her real parents. Unfortunately, cases like these happen very often and there is no way of anticipating what the correct or proper decision is. After all, a decision of this kind, will affect the rest of her life forever. I do however think that biological parents should have the right to know their daughter but I do not think that it would be healthy for the 9 year old girl to be put in the position of maybe later in the future having to end up as a foster child again. Maybe with time, after a couple of years, both set of parents can be a part of this child life. A lot of kids are raised without having one set of parents, this little girl is lucky to have two who are fighting for her. Aristotle’s point of view is built around the premise that people should achieve an excellent character as a pre-condition for attaining happiness or well-being, which brings me to think that he would agree with my perspective of care-based point of view. I think that he would trust the biological parents because they made themselves get better and achieved this successfully. In terms of the Utilitarianism perspective, I think his view would be that if the child wanted to be happy, no matter what the conditions, she would work through achieving it.