Rape Case Study

Destiny, a young girl of age 14 walks into the doctor’s office. Dirk, the doctor finds out that the young patient has been infected with an STD. There are signs of rape, caused by a fellow school member, and signs of abuse at home. As a doctor, Dirk is worried that the infection will spread in his neighborhood. The doctor feels responsible for Destiny's well being, and he is also aware of his obligation to treat his patient's information with confidentiality. The girl however insists that her family cannot know about what happened, as this will get her in serious trouble at home. Dirk thinks doing nothing to prevent the infection from spreading would not be right either. The moral dilemma of this case is that, should Dirk breach the patient

A balanced judgment can be made on the good achieved by a given action or choice. [6] The greater weight is on the amount of benefit for a given potential or harm more than the justification of a specific action. [6] In another way, the greater the amount of potential harm for a given benefit, the less likely it is that the action can be justified. Under Utilitarianism, Dirk should inform Destiny’s mother, the school, and the neighborhood residents in order to stop the further spreading of the disease. By providing the information to the public, greater prevention and greater benefit can be provided and

[6] Care is most often defined as a practice, value, disposition, or virtue, and is frequently portrayed as an overlapping set of concepts. [6,8] It suggests that there is a moral implication in the fundamental elements of relationships and dependencies, seeking to preserve relationships by inspecting and promoting the well-being of care givers and care receivers. [6,8] Care ethics accentuates the importance of caring motivation and emotion. [6] Care is seen as an ongoing process, which is both a practice and a disposition, which involves taking the concerns and needs of the other as the basis for action. Four phases of the caring process are identified as caring about, taking care of, care giving and care receiving. [6] Linked to these, four core ethical values emerge: attentiveness as being attentive to the needs of others, responsibility, which is embedded in implicit cultural practices, competence to provide good care, which includes the availability of adequate resources and responsiveness of the care-receiver to the care, that is, seeking to understand the needs of others by considering the other's position as that other expresses it.