ETHICAL DILEMMAS CASE STUDY

Document Type:Case Study

Subject Area:Criminology

Document 1

The compromises are founded on various ethical theories, and the consequences on either side of the bargain are not unambiguously acceptable. This essay will, therefore, expounds on three scenarios of moral conflict and how the ethical dilemmas surrounding them can be refuted. The stimuli that led to these conflicts by the actors that are protagonists in these situations is also probed. A discussion is done on the consequences of their possible prioritized decision path on resolving the issues, concurrently with the possible admonishments of the foregone approaches. Body 1. Mr. Wilson will be serving the term in a prison where his mental health will be neglected. On the other hand, Judge Owens can decide to sentence Mr. Wilson to a shallow time of 18 months or less at the county prison so that there is a possibility of him receiving treatment.

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By doing so, he will not have delivered justice to the business owners who have the right to the defendant receiving the maximum sentence. Approaching ethics from this angle means accommodating the rights of everyone involved in the decision-making process. The Rights approach ensures dignity is preserved at an individual level and all the people are treated not as a means to an end, but as an end. Since some rights that pertain to individuals as humans are inseparable from the entity of their existential, the appropriateness of the Rights Approach ensures these rights are not infringed in the journey to betterment of society. Application of this by Judge Owens means that the right to medical treatment of the defendant, Mr.

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Owens, is not violated or curtailed by any means. The District Attorney Similarly, in a situation that requires the critical analysis and application of the different perspectives to ethics, Jessica is a district attorney who finds herself at loggerheads with the Chief of police and the whole police force due to a desire to fulfill the promises she made to the people. She is required to loosen her strong and firm stand against the police department and consequently go against the promises she made to the public during her campaign to the office or to stick to her fight against any misconduct by police and be in constant conflict with the police chief. During her campaign for office, Jessica felt that the incumbent was too linear on what she considered as illegal acts by the police officers.

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She made a promise to the community that when she ascends to the office, she will prosecute such cases and because her campaign was a success, she came to feel like the community agreed with her thoughts. Embarking on a journey to bring the officers who do wrong to justice, she cracked down on several cases. The Common Good Approach regards every single individual in a community as an entity that associates with others creating a more wide fabric of society to enable co-existence. In this ethical theory, no member of society is considered as a more significant entity to others. Certain conditions in this fabric of society are shared equally to ensure sustainability and of the community as an enabling endeavor for the good of everyone.

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By this approach, no part of society is promoted in regards to its elements while eroding another part of the community. Therefore, by sticking to her initial goal of seeing that all the members of the police force involved in actions that seem to go against their code of moral conduct, Jessica would have acted in a manner that is advantageous to the community as a whole. While on patrol duty, Scot conducts a search on a traffic wrongdoer without a search warrant. On finding the man with a significant amount of pharmaceutical-type capsules in the trunk of his car, Scot realizes the mistake that he has committed. He is now faced with the dilemma of either letting the man go, therefore allowing a reprobate to walk without punishment or, he reports the matter to the police department and hands over the man.

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By bringing the man to book, Scot will place his career in jeopardy since he might get dismissed from duty for the illegal search that he conducted. As a rookie on probation at the police department, the moral dilemma that he has found himself entangled in requires him to find a balance between trusting his moral compass and saving his future as a police officer. These are the thoughts that would influence the path that Scot would undertake in his verdict. Utilitarianism as an ethical theory dictates that the path one takes when faced with a complicated scenario involving a moral dilemma should be according to the best consequences that result from it. The self-interest of one individual, or egoism, are to be set aside when deciding what route should be taken to get off a situation of an ethical dilemma.

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Scot should therefore in his position use the theory of Utilitarianism to solve the moral question that has been postured to him by the circumstances he faces. Going by this, Scot should report the matter to the police department and bring the man that he arrested along with him. It is not a random toss of the coin but rather a careful, in-depth analysis of every angle that our actions could be tackled from to be desirable. In the situations presented above, precedents are not applicable, and therefore reliability falls solely on the hands of the current ethical dilemma that is in question. Different perspectives that are pre-described by the various ethical theories require harnessing into practice in a bid to make conclusions.

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