The Cove Psihoyos

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Louie Psihoyos presented his documentary “The Cove” uncovers the brutal realism and unethical issues in Taiji, Japan, where more than 20,000 estimated dolphins are slaughtered yearly, while others are sold to dolphin trainers and kept captivity for human entertainment around the world. Taiji is well known for showing pride and loving to dolphins that existed there, having many paintings and statues of dolphins all over the town as their main attraction to tourist, which gives the town a sense of self-respect. The way that the town expresses the love of dolphins, you would never expect any slaughtering of dolphins existed. The majority population of the town hardly had any idea that this was taking place. Even more unsettling is that the dolphin…show more content…
Many dolphin trainers that uses dolphins for entertainment are buying dolphins for an extremely high price from this town. They are not aware that these cruel actions are occurring and right after dolphins are purchased the remaining dolphins will be slaughtered for dolphin meat and disguised labeled at many consumer store as whale meat. As a utilitarian would say “our ultimate reason to do or not to do an act hinges on figuring out if the results of the action in question will bring about more happiness over unhappiness.” So meaning that if my action creates more happiness vs. unhappiness then it is my moral duty/ obligation to do that action. A Japanese/dolphin trainer utilitarian think that they are doing their duty/obligation to creating the most amount of happiness, by thinking to themselves that by slaughtering and capturing dolphins it will make other people feel happy because slaughtering dolphins and making money will create the most happiness for themselves and families. Also for the dolphin trainers that purchase dolphins for entertainment reasons they feel they are providing a service to other people and creating the most amount of happiness. In my perspective I believe by watching the documentary it strongly shows that utilitarianism definitely goes against the slaughtering of dolphins, because it clearly shows that the actions of the Japanese fishermen are causing more unhappiness to humans and non-human animals. Utilitarianism also has to take into consideration the happiness/unhappiness of dolphins also because dolphins have many characteristics of a human being such as they can feel pleasure/pain and happiness/unhappiness. Someone might argue how can we take into consideration the happiness/unhappiness of non-human animals when they don’t have any human like features or characteristics of a human being to determine

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