A few thoughts on seeing moral qualities in the world

I just a few thoughts on the sort of theories, such as McDowell's and Foot's, where the virtuous person can just see moral qualities in the world and then act on that basis. The idea here is that one can act totally on the basis of facts without the need for any sort of desire, feeling etc. as a reason. Now I think I can come up with a sort of counter-example to this sort of thinking on the basis of a Taylor type point that he made in his "Good and Evil". Essentially, he rejects the importance of duty in ethics because it seems possible for duty to to conflict with deep human feelings such as compassion and so on. I think that this same sort thing can happen on the McD sort of views. The case I want to imagine is one in which a virtuous agent acquires motivating reasons from aspects of reality which motivate him to act in particular way which is in direct opposition to the the way he desires to act on the basis of his feelings of compassion and sympathy which have been aroused by the situation in which he finds himself. A great example of this sort of thing can be found in the climax of the movie "Gone Baby Gone" where the protagonist is forced to make this sort of choice. He is a private investigator and while working on child abduction case learns that the woman whose child has gone missing is a terrible mother who spends more time at the bars than with her child. It becomes quite clear that if restored to her mother the child will not end up having a happy childhood. As the main character continues with the case he eventually discovers that the child had been abducted by a husband and wife who desired a child very much and intended to provide her with a wonderful life. They have done no wrongs to the child (other than, depending how you look at it, abducting her in the first place) and presumably will never do any to her. The movie makes it clear that the child's life will be much better living with the abductors than with her biological mother. Thus, the protagonist is confronted with this decision: report his discovery to the police (and thus restore the daughter to her mother) or do nothing (and thus leave the daughter with her abductors).

Now it seems quite clear in this case that, on the McD sort of view, if any moral qualities were discovered in the facts they would point toward restoring the daughter (as she had been stolen from her rightful mother!) yet any decent human being can sympathize with the arguments of the abductors who continually stated how much better off the girl would be with them. My intuition, and I think Taylor would agree, would be to leave the girl where she was and not report the findings. However, the protagonist decides to call the police, the husband and wife are arrested and the girl is brought back to her mother. The film ends with a scene of neglect where the mother goes out for a "night on the town" and leave the daughter at home for the night.

So my thought in thinking that this would be a counter-example is this: how could what the protagonist did be the right thing to do? And how could a McD-type view say that it was not (for clearly the abductors had done something wrong)? Though I could be wrong, I do not think that McD type view could get the intuitive result and if this is true then the only thing that can be appealed to in explaining the intuition would be this: human feeling and sentiment. And if this is true, I think that it must be admitted that a view that leaves out these considerations is deeply flawed.

Maybe I am wrong here, but I think it makes sense.