Submission

Yes, this is a genuine ethical dilemma and not just a hard business call. The stakeholders are the company and its owners, Roman and the employees whose jobs depend on the revenue targets, the advertisers buying reach, and, most exposed of all, the young and adolescent users the screening system currently protects, along with the families around them. The values in tension are real on both sides: financial survival and a duty to employees pull toward removal, while the duty to protect vulnerable users and the platform's own promise of safety pull toward keeping the screen. It is a dilemma because both sides rest on values most ethical traditions endorse, and no available option preserves them all.

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Under a consequentialist lens the removal can be argued both ways, which is exactly why the framework has to be applied carefully. The egoistic and narrow-utilitarian case supports it: revenue rises, layoffs become less likely, and the measurable beneficiaries are many. But a full utilitarian accounting weighs the harms to young users from exposure and addiction, harms that are diffuse, long-lasting, and landing on the least resilient stakeholders. The triple bottom line makes the social column strongly negative even while the financial column improves. On balance the framework challenges the decision more than it supports it, because the visible gains are short-term and concentrated while the harms are long-term and spread across people who never consented to carry them.

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The intentionalist framework challenges the removal most directly. The platform has a duty of protection toward minors that it took on when it built the screen, and users hold rights that do not weaken because honoring them becomes expensive. The categorical imperative test is hard to pass: a universal rule of "remove protections for the vulnerable whenever revenue requires it" would make platform safety promises meaningless everywhere. There is a partial defense: Roman also owes duties to employees and owners, and those duties are real, not rationalizations. But duties to shareholders are conditional on lawful, rights-respecting conduct, while the duty not to knowingly expose minors to harm is closer to absolute. Under this framework the decision is far easier to challenge than to support.

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Agent-centered thinking asks two related questions: what would a person of good character do, and what does Roman owe the owners as their agent? Agency theory gives the removal its strongest support anywhere in the case: Roman is employed to pursue the principals' interests, and the principals want the targets hit. But agency is not a moral blank check; an agent's mandate does not extend to harms the principals themselves could not ethically authorize. The virtues in play are courage, honesty, and practical wisdom. A person of practical wisdom would notice that the quota pressure, not the screen, is the real problem, raise the conflict openly with leadership, and refuse to treat the harm to young users as a rounding error. The decision can be supported narrowly through agency and challenged strongly through virtue.

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