I always thought Omelas was meant to be a metaphor for Christianity - eternal life and happiness can be yours if only you accept that the purest, kindest, and most innocent person to have ever existed was brutally tortured and murdered in order to allow it to happen.
And we can see in our society today how many people are willing to accept that versus those who don’t.
If there is truly no margin for error in the fuel supply, then there shouldn’t be any ethical problem. If there’s a stowaway on board, then the shuttle would have burned extra fuel to accelerate up to its cruising speed and the ship is already doomed. Or, if the shuttle uses exactly half of its fuel to accelerate and saves half its fuel to decelerate, the it will be fine even with an extra passenger on board. The speed will be less than originally planned because of the extra mass, and the trip will take longer than planned, but there will be enough fuel to slow down.
(Technically speaking, it’s not half the fuel to accelerate and half to decelerate, since mass decreases as fuel is burned. Still, you could budget the exact percentage of fuel for acceleration and deceleration. I wonder if anyone has done the calculation to see if the trip fails under those rules, and if kicking the stowaway out fixes the problem.)
People have been overthinking that story for 70 years now. According to Wikipedia, John Campbell kept sending it back to the author for rewrites because he kept coming up with ways to save the girl.
Oh, there’s a margin for error, just not 50kg worth, there’s also nothing in the story that supports the idea that jettisoning the payload would save the stowaway. You could argue that it’s not an ethical conundrum at all, but rather an anvilicious Aesop about how you ‘canna change the laws of physics.’
Arthur C Clarke’s (of course!) The Star.
Yeah. That one bugged me because Scotty had worked out storing himself in a transporter buffer a century-ish prior to the episode.
Babylon 5 had a similar sort of story that didn’t have to be in a sci-fi setting. In the episode “Believers”, the station’s doctor has diagnosed an alien child with a fatal medical condition. A simple surgery could easily save the child’s life, but the parents refuse, because the religious and cultural traditions of their people prohibit cutting into a living person lest the spirit escape the body and leave little more than a soulless husk behind.
The doctor ultimately defies the wishes of the parents and the station’s CO, and the surgery is a success - but when the parents find out, they ritually kill their child since in their eyes he is already dead.
“The Cold Equations” is just a version of the Trolley Problem. No one complains that the Trolley Problem is unrealistic because you can just stop the trolley. That’s missing the entire point.
I’d love to think that, but I suspect many of us are reading this board on a device made partly by child labor.
Another Babylon 5 episode comes to mind, “Passing Through Gethsemane.”
In an early scene, Garibaldi and DeLenn are watching a newscast where a serial killer had been sentenced to “death of personality.” Instead of being executed, his mind is wiped, and he’s made to serve the community to atone for his past crimes.
There is a community of monks living on the space station, and one of them, Brother Edward, played by Brad Dourif, finds his quarters have a message apparently handwritten in blood on his wall: “Death walks among you.” He also finds a black rose. Whenever he calls security about his problems, the evidence has mysteriously disappeared. Edward gets flashbacks of him committing horrible atrocities, but doesn’t fully understand them. Dourif of course excels at playing characters teetering on the edge of sanity.
Brother Edward confronts the head of their order, Brother Theo. Theo doesn’t know Edward’s past origins, as the order makes it their ethos to give everyone second chances and live a life of devotion to God, regardless of their history. Brother Edward does some research on his own and finds that he himself had a “death of personality” as punishment for his many acts of murder. He eventually meets his tormentors, and they’re the families of the people he murdered. He has a Jesus in Gethsemane moment, as he fully faces his accusers. They eventually torture him to death, and the chief instigator is caught and confesses.
In the last scene, which takes place some time later, Sheridan is in the arboretum talking to Brother Theo, and tells him forgiveness is a difficult thing. A new monk, Brother Malcolm, enters the arboretum and Sheridan recognizes him as the man who killed Brother Edward. Malcolm had since had a mind wipe and was inducted into Theo’s brotherhood. Sheridan refuses to shake Malcolm’s hand and glares at him in disgust. Brother Theo tells Malcolm, “You’ll have to excuse Captain Sheridan. You disturbed his concentration. We were discussing the difficulty of forgiveness and granting second chances.”
In another riff on that sort of thing, Fredric Brown once did a story where — well, it’s the punchline, and it’s telegraphed as my reply to you, but (a) it’s a not-too-distant future with seemingly-flawless lie-detector tech, and (b) a lot of legal safeguards have since been instituted, such that prosecutors need to build a pretty strong case before they can break out the convincer, and so, okay, some criminals get away with it, but enough get conclusively convicted for the system to keep motoring along even as the underworld keeps on keeping on…
…and, against that backdrop, suddenly crooks start beating the lie detector; the authorities are kind of keeping it quiet, but task their best investigator with finding out what the heck is going on…
…and what he eventually learns is, a guy has found out how to put them under hypnosis, of the only-what-you-consent-to variety, and has them enthusiastically agree to the proposition that, hey, you can pass the lie-detector test, because you’ve done nothing to feel guilty about; you’re not a criminal. And so they get vindicated in court and get away with murder or whatever; but, maybe nine times out of ten, they go on to commit no further crimes, having internalized the message that they’re not criminals.
And so the question becomes: should one join this guy, who tells people their sins are forgiven and washed away before they go and sin no more, even though it means their crimes go unpunished? Heck, should cops quit the force in droves and sign on to expand that operation as, like, his apostles or something, upon figuring that bringing evildoers to justice is less commendable than redeeming them on the road to building some kind of crime-free paradise?
2010: The Year we Make Contact
Will I dream?
Oh, and the book, 2010: Odyssey Two (which I forgot until just now I actually read) featured life forms in the atmosphere of Jupiter that were annihilated for the sake of promoting life elsewhere.
I… don’t see that way at all. I thought it was an overt and uninteresting commentary on contemporary societies underpinned by fundamental injustice of any kind. Some people just accept it as an immutable consequence of society as it is and must be, some refuse. They seek, either literally/physically or, more plausibly, metaphorically to build a better society, such as by devoting their lives to the pursuit of overturning injustice. They don’t get to just sit back and enjoy the fruits of an unjust society because they cannot stand to do so with the knowledge of that injustice.
How about The Twilight Zone’s It’s a Good Life. Is it ok to murder a child to save society? Would it effectively be pre-emptive self-defense?
Nothing “pre-emptive” about it, IMHO. The child is actively engaged in a series of crimes, holding the town hostage (and putting on atrocious teleplays). It’s not “pre-emptive” self-defense to shoot a hostage taker who has a gun and has already used it to murder one or more (actually, reading the plot summary, several) hostages (including children) and signals a willingness to continue to do so according to his own childish whims.
This was the stock-in-trade of Century City.
I always thought it was meant to be a metaphor for the USA; or maybe for Western Civ in general.
I mean, we’re obviously not as perfect for almost everybody as Omelas is. But we keep getting, or at least I keep hearing/seeing, the argument that lots of people are so much better off! therefore stop complaining about the people taking damage!
Yup.
Not to mention our clothes, at least part of our food –
What I’m really looking for are stories similar to the trolley problem, where there is no clear right or wrong, and even if the protagonist makes a decision they’re not sure they made the right one.
There are many Star Trek episodes that almost do this, but ultimately the captain seems to believe they acted correctly. The only example that comes to mind where this might not be true is the Voyager episode Tuvix.
Consider Le Guin’s masterpiece (in my opinion): The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. Le Guin is pretty clearly sympathetic to the material-poor anarchist society of Anarres, but the “ambiguous” in the title is well-supported. The capitalist society of Urras (at least, the part where the protagonist spends most of his time) has a lot to recommend it, and Anarres is far from perfect.
It’s been compared to Ayn Rand’s works, or as an answer to them, but that’s not fair: where Rand is a terrible author barely hiding her insane fanaticism behind various mouthpiece characters, Le Guin writes a subtle book full of doubt and questions.
The story is actually available online here.
Obviously there is a lot technically “wrong” with it, given it was written before actual manned space flight, let alone UNmanned flight (which would really be more appropriate for such a task).
That’s not really the point of the story though.
The story is not really an ethical conundrum IMHO. It’s more like an unwinnable Kobayashi Maru scenario. There is no outcome where the EDS pilot can save the girl. It’s more about his handling of the situation. It’s a common theme in a lot of sci-fi stories and survival tales involving the sea or aviation.
According to Wikipedia, Le Guin got the idea from William James, who got it from Dostoyevsky, who got it from Christianity. Although, in Christianity, Jesus sacrifices himself willingly.
I’ve seen “Omelas” discussed as an exercise in exploring purely utilitarian ethics, where the best society is one which offers the greatest good to the greatest number (or, as Star Trek II put it, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”).