The ones who stay in Omelas
Ursula Le Guin's short story " The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas " contains a terrible moral conundrum. Many people have agonised over it: to my knowledge, no-one has solved it. Attempts that I have seen all in some way change the framing of the story, whether by justifying blood sacrifice , insisting that there must be a better way , or creating a better alternative . But if you change the framing, you have not solved the problem. You have avoided it. As I read through Le Guin's story to the end, I recognised the moral conundrum. It is similar to the one I posed in this piece . In Le Guin's story, as in mine, the facts don't matter. It is what people believe that matters. In Le Guin's story, millions of people believe their happiness and that of everyone they love - indeed, their very existence - depends on a child being condemned to live in darkness, pain and squalor. They accept that the child's suffering is necessary, so they do nothing about it. ...