The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

This one’s short enough I read it twice in the same sitting, once for the sentences and once for the argument underneath them, which is a different kind of read than I usually do up here. Not a novel, so I won’t pretend it needs the pacing of one. Fifteen pages, maybe less.

I lean toward Mill’s flavor of utilitarianism when I bother to think about it at all, and this story is one of the harsher critiques of that whole position I’ve come across, better at the job than most of the philosophers who actually argue it for a living. The city, the festival, then the child in the room. Le Guin walks you through the happiness of an entire city built on the suffering of one kid and dares you to keep believing the math works out.

What stuck with me on the second pass was the option the story doesn’t dwell on, freeing the child, which some readers land on as the real question underneath the famous one. Not everyone walks. Some stay and do nothing, which might be its own kind of answer. I keep thinking it’s the real world equivalent of a choice nobody up here gets to avoid either, you can walk off into the dark with nothing figured out, or you can stay and carry what staying costs you.

I’d hand this to anyone starting a first philosophy class before I’d hand them the textbook. Five stars for something that takes fifteen minutes and outlasts books I spent a whole season with.