If you have not seen “Gone Baby Gone” and want to, I highly suggest you stop reading this post as it is littered with spoilers. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Last weekend Keli and I watched “Gone Baby Gone” and it posed an interesting, hopefully hypothetical, situation.
For those of you who have not seen the movie, and don’t mind having some things spoiled for you, here’s a breakdown of the movie:
- 4-year-old girl is raised by her single mom
- Mom is a crackhead that leaves her little girl at home, in bed and alone, while she hits the bar to party
- Private investigator (Casey Affleck) is hired to find the girl. He ends up finding out Morgan Freeman and his wife took the girl in and intend to raise the little girl as their own.
- Affleck finds out that the little girl’s uncle talked to his cop friend (Ed Harris) about helping the girl
- Ed Harris talked to some police head honcho (Morgan Freemn)
- Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman came in at night, while the mom was away, and took/kidnapped the little girl
- Casey Affleck had a decision to make: Turn in Morgan Freeman for kidnapping and have the little girl return to her historically-neglectful junkie parent? Or turn a blind eye and let the girl remain in a recognizedly better living situation with more potential opportunity?
Do you think it is morally and ethically acceptable to kidnap a child and raise them as your own, when you know you can provide for them better than their biological parent? Does the end justify the means?
Related posts:
- My review: Sin City
- Cause I’m As Free As a Bird Now…
- Another sappy father moment
- Lost in Translation
- 10 Important Lessons My Dad Taught Me
Digg | 
Stumble it! | 
Del.icio.us
2 comments ↓
A lot of what goes on under the hood in this kind of dilemma is a somewhat legalistic black-and-white view of law and order. Is kidnapping a child wrong because the law says it’s a felony punishable by x, y, and z? Is kidnapping a child wrong because it exposes both the child and the parents to great distress? Is it wrong because it separates the child from her natural (and hence presumably best) family situation and in doing so causes the child harm?
Well, the law certainly says you can’t behave this way; society must punish kidnappers. I haven’t seen the film, but presume the crackhead neglectful mother was very upset about her child disappearing, so there’s another strike against. How’d the kid feel about it (not that a four-year-old is an excellent judge of things)? Sounds like the switch away from the natural family unit (neglectful crackhead partygirl momma) wasn’t intrinsically doing a lot of harm.
Discarding the legal aspect (the law is there to provide general-case guidelines, but this is a specific situation that requires specific application of judgment), this leaves us measuring the expected harm of keeping the mother and child separated against the expected harm that the mother will do to the child through neglect. Throw in a little self-interest on the part of the investigator (career ramifications, potential for feelings of guilt and such) and he ramifications for the kidnappers, and you’ve got quite a poser on your hands. I’d need a lot more details.
The crackhead mother was very upset over her child being missing, once all of the police questioning was finished.
Also, the movie did show the little girl with her “new” family and she looked happier than she was when the movie showed her living with her mother.
Leave a Comment