The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

I've been listening to some new lectures on CD. They discuss value and how humans place values on various things. This naturally leads to a lot of philosophical discussions. I REALLY enjoyed the first course of lectures I bought on philosophy. I learned so much and found myself often in agreement with the professor, though not so much that it would worry me. This new set of lectures is taught by a professor with whom I do NOT see eye to eye. I disagree with almost everything he says! He mixes definitions of words and uses logic that I find unconvincing. He even begins at times with premises that I question and takes them as self-evident to construct his arguments. Ahh!!!

But in spite of these frustrations, he is very intelligent and I am learning some valuable things, so I'll keep on it. One story he told had reference to the idea of utility and measuring the rightness of a choice or action by the amount of good you can do by that choice/action. The problem with that approach is illustrated beautifully by a fictional story or thought experiment called "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula LeGuin. The story describes a utopian city called Omelas in which the citizens lead idyllic lives, filled with meaningful pursuits, accomplishment, joy, friendship, and whatever else you may choose to call valuable in a life. She attempts to paint a picture that almost anyone could find agreeable and relatively believable. She then describes a little room somewhere in the city.

"In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is.

"The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. .... It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. .... The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer."

It is explained that "they [the citizens of Omelas] all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly upon this child's abominable misery."

Further, the author tells us: "If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms."

Some, when they learn of this injustice, and others at a later time, reject the terms. They walk away from Omelas and never return. The point of this fictional story is to highlight the injustice of weighing the virtue of actions by what brings about the greatest possible good. Something inside of us recoils at the thought of treating another human being that way. That child, who doesn't deserve such evil, has been made an unwilling sacrifice for the benefit of the rest of the city! Despite it being fictional, hearing the story gave me chills. The innocence of the child and the gross injustice he/she suffers makes me want to take the child in my arms and comfort it. I hope you feel as strong a sense of revulsion and disgust as I did on first hearing the story.

The story was brought forcefully to my mind a week ago as we discussed the Atonement of Jesus Christ in a church meeting. As we discussed Christ's willing sacrifice, the thought occurred to me again and again that He did not deserve what He suffered. His spiritual and physical anguish was in payment for sins He didn't commit and, like the child of Omelas, He became a sacrifice to enable billions of others to inherit wonderful joy, to be made whole, and to grow and develop and become like God. The difference between the real story of Christ and the fictional story of Omelas is that Christ was willing.

Nothing in us recoils at the thought that someone may give up his own comfort, his own happiness, even his own life for the benefit of another. We even consider that to be noble. But to make that choice for another - and in Omelas, using an innocent child - making such a choice must be one of the greatest evils we as humans can inflict on each other. It is rationalized to be good by the citizens of Omelas because when weighed on the scales of utility, we find that it does the greatest good for the greatest number of people. And after all, the evil that is done only affects one small child ...