Speaking of Swordfish, if the whole point was just to get their computer hacker into the manager’s office for a few minutes so he could move the money, what was the point of the ridiculously elaborate hostage situation and ridiculously elaborate escape?
What with the free food and sex, I’d have a hell of a hard time walking away from Omelas.
But that’s the central premise of the whole problem. Obviously the problem is easily resolved if you ignore the premise. Except that if you ignore the premise you’re no longer dealing with same problem so the original problem is still unresolved.
For the Swordfish scenario, I would shoot the kid and then spend the rest of my life atoning for it, shooting myself if I have to.
For the Omelas cityscape situation, I would stay. Leaving doesn’t change the situation any. Although I find the situation repugnant, my boycott won’t do anything, and it merely disrespects the sacrifice that child made. I would try to find a way of rectifying the situation from within. Of course, it’s most likely I would just accept the status quo and live the rest of my days as a happy, illness-free individual.
Great thread by the way, kaylasdad99.
That’s only if you set Omelas on fire.
The child did not “make” any sacrifice; the child was sacrificed. I wouldn’t say that deserves anything like the “respect” that a genuine self-sacrifice would.
Also, the point of walking away isn’t to change anything, at least not for Omelas or the child. The point is to free oneself from the evil; at least, that’s how I understood it.
The child was sacrificed, voluntarily or not. In that regard, I must respect the sacrifice. It’s evil because it was involuntary, but it still deserves respect and appreciation. I guess we disagree.
If the point isn’t to change anything, then I say that’s a selfish and cowardly choice. Freeing yourself from the evil only frees you.
I have not read the story (and don’t plan on it soon). But, if this really is a correct statement of the dilemma, then the answer is simple.
My walking away will do nothing to stop the evil. Therefore I have no moral imperative to do it. As long as I had nothing to do with establishing this, then I’m not even responsible for the evil act. I would be if there was a way to stop it, and I refused that option, but there’s not, so I’m not.
Now, it seems that I do not know that there is nothing I can do. Which unfortunately means I have an obligation to try something. But, if walking away will not stop the evil, then that is one of my obligations.
Now, if this is a question of what I would do: I could see getting tired of trying to stop it, and having to give up the fight. I’m not sure at what point I would decide I’d done enough. I probably would at least have to have trained a protegee. But, even after that, I still have no imperative to leave. I might leave temporarily if that’s an option, to help me not have to deal with it for a while. But I could return, and I still would not be doing anything wrong.
The idea that evil is this tangible thing that one can be somehow infect people makes no sense to me. If one became evil from benefiting from evil, then we’d all be evil.
There’s a collective guilt. One moral guideline is to ask what would be the consequences if everyone were to follow your example and make the same decisions you made. But that principle, the right course is clear: if everyone in Omelas chose to walk away, the city would cease to exist and the child would be freed. It’s hard to argue that an action that would be moral if everyone did it, is not moral for you to do as an individual. So you should leave the city.
I didn’t personally kill the child, so I suffer only a 2nd degree guilt. Who instituted this system in the first place?
I still say that leaving disrespects her sacrifice. Maybe it’s just a rationalization, but I see leaving the city without any clear course of action as a selfish, self-righteous choice.
Since I like the ending of my above post, I’m going to start a new one to address the more complicated issue: Would I kill one innocent child to eliminate all the diseases in the world?
That one requires determining the answer to two questions: Will it actually work? and Are there other options? If the answer is yes and no, respectively, I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be the right choice to kill the child. If the first answer is no, obviously shooting is stupid. If both answers are yes is where it becomes a balance game.
You’d need to compare the other options, and decide which was worse. Is my lack of guilt and the child’s life worth more than whatever downsides would be expressed by choosing one of the other options? If killing a child can cure the world, you’d have to think a similar thing could be done with animals, even if it wasn’t quite as effective. That I’d probably go for. But if it’s just what we have now, or killing the child: I really don’t know. I do know I’d have to atone for the child’s death for the rest of my life.
Finally, I left out the option that one of the two questions is unknowable. I’d say unknowable for the first means “No,” while unknowable for the second would be assumed “yes” in all the scenarios that matter. If percentages come in, I’d probably want at least 95% surety before challenging those assumptions mentioned in the previous sentence.
I think these questions touch upon several cultural and ethical cornerstones. I would love to see a study funded that asked these questions to multiple cultures around the world. I’m guessing running the minimal gamut would require asking American, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, Indian, Iranian, Saudi Arabian, South African, Nigerian, Algerian, Inuit, and French. Don’t squabble over the list of countries, as that could make a good thread of its own.
BigT writes:
> I have not read the story (and don’t plan on it soon).
It’s two pages long.
You’ve misstated the guideline. It’s often simplified to that, but that’s really not what it means. Every time the guideline is used, it doesn’t matter if everyone does it, just if a significant portion do. It just so happens that “if everybody does it” and “if a significant portion do it” have the same value.
In this case, there is a difference. A significant portion is not enough. The odds of everyone following your example is infinitesimally small. The only way there’s a real chance of everyone leaving is if you stay and try to convince everyone to leave. Only once you have everyone leaving would you have an imperative to leave.
Plus, it’s not like the guideline is upheld in our everyday lives, anyway. Is not having a child immoral? If everybody did it, it would be the end of human civilization in a generation. But you know that enough people are being born that you don’t have to add a child.
This is why these are guidelines, not absolutes.
Is it public domain, or not? If I would be breaking the law to do it for free, then I won’t be able to for a while.
How often do you listen to songs that are still in copyright on YouTube? You broke the law every time you did that. Oh, and let me correct myself. The story is more like four pages long in any average-sized book.
I think one thing being forgotten is that the ones who walk away don’t just go out in the world in general. They go somewhere specific. I like to think it’s a place where they can work at undoing the evil that is Omelas.
And it is an evil. The whole point of the story, for me, isn’t about what you’d do in that situation (and I’d take the kid outside in a heartbeat), or that there are people who walk away- it’s the bit just before that, about how everyone else comes to embrace the child’s suffering as necessary. It’s this kind of cognitively dissonant argument, and the insidiousness of claims that it is all for the greater good, that the tale serves to illuminate, I think. It’s a warning more than a moral dilemma. To consider the roots of your prosperity. To question your own motives in acquiescing to the status quo. Ultimately, I think part of it comes from Le Guin’s interest in Eastern philosophy (better expounded in Always Coming Home, I think)- Walking Away isn’t a cowardly inaction, IMO. It is rather the equivalent of saying “Mu!”
And the argument that destroying the pact is causing hundreds of others to suffer and die is a non-starter. You’re merely reducing them to the same base as everyone else, removing their totally unearned privilege. Now they’ll have to actually work hard for their happiness - which, I’d contend, is better.
I wonder if one could view Apartheid South Africa as an Omelas of sorts - the whites there enjoyed wealth, privilege, and power (more so than they do now), but only by brutally supressing the majority, non-white population. For that matter, one imagines that the privileges class in almost any dictatorship would think much like the good people of Omelas did - easy enough, after all, to imagine that the suffering of people you rarely meet and are raised to despise is for “the greater good”.
This is very important. In Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity, you cannot fight something which is wrong on its own terms. Instead, you must snap it like breaking out of a trance. Saying “Mu!” is to break the premise of the situation: to say that the battle is being fought on the wrong terms. You must look past what is to what can be and should be.