Presenting a moral decision

Every day many of us have to decide in difficult ethical and moral questions and mostly our decisions have a fatal effect on the future. The actual job in certain professions is making such decisions. For example judges have to make very hard decisions that have to follow the law, but may sometimes seem unethical for some individuals. As a common sense suggests personal life cannot always strictly follow the law. There are some situations where other, moral laws should be applied. And this makes the work of judges or the people responsible for decision making so complicated and unpopular. There are several ethical decisions and each suggests something else. Let’s just mention two most diverse approaches.

According to Kant, law should be applied in every situation with no exception. But just imagine that if you killed someone in self defense, you should be facing the verdict of capital punishment just because killing is illegal with no exception… The opposite of this is situation ethics with more humane approach that suggests that each situation should be judged in separate way. Now let’s go to something more specific. Now I will mention a concrete case that happened in Slovakia last year and is still in process. An 8 years old girl, from a small village in the middle of Slovakia hanged herself just because her brother took her doll and didn’t want to give it back. But this was just the last drop. Since she was born, her three brothers badly treated and abused her. Her grandmother has found her hanging in stall, still shaking. She cut the rope and called the ambulance. The doctors were able to rescue her avoiding brain damage. In other words she has soon recovered and was ready to go home, BUT the state accused the family of mistreating her.

The court decided to put her temporarily into the orphanage as it is the right decision according to the law. She has been there for almost a year since that incident. This girl publicly declared that she would really like to go back home to her family and live a normal life again. But according to the state law this shouldn’t happen in a normal family and therefore she deserves better treatment. Doesn’t it seem like the girl’s actual needs are not being considered? This law may have helped some other victims that were abused at home and did not want to live there but will it help this girl wanting to go home? The orphanage is the only option that the state can offer right now. Although she might be treated relatively better, the real question is if it is possible to compare orphanage full of strange people to your own family. Now it is only up to the judge to decide whether to send her back home or leave her grow up in the orphanage. We must take into consideration that the kids that were brought up in the orphanages by several nurses have difficulties to find a decent job and build up their own, normal family.

If I were the judge, I would decide to send the girl home, because it is what she really wants and it could cause her a trauma if she stayed in the orphanage against her will and she might try to hang herself again. On the other hand, I suppose that her parents learnt from this incident, and therefore they will be more careful about how their kids get along.