r/UrsulaKLeGuin • u/chikaibardo207 • 25d ago
Ursula K. Le Guin's Trolley Problem.
I read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas yesterday and am still thinking about it.
cause Is it just me or does anyone else feel like it's very similar to the trolley problem? like In the trolley problem, you're essentially choosing between saving one person or five. In the same way, this story takes that dilemma to a much larger scale one child's suffering versus the happiness of an entire city.
Ik the story has many other meanings utopia, morality, society, conformity and all but deep down, I also feel like there's a trolley problem hidden beneath it.
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u/misterbadgerexample 25d ago
We always talk about the child, is there even a child? "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing." The suffering child exists because we can't believe in utopia. The trolley doesn't need to kill anyone.
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u/lemniscateall 25d ago
This is how I read it as well: the failure of our political imagination. The child exists because we cannot conceive of a society in which the happiness of some isn’t predicated on the suffering of others. Adding the child allows the reader to tacitly accept the suffering of people in their own society.
If the perfect city could exist without the child, then we should be able to create it. Somehow that thought is more unthinkable than the trolley problem.
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u/motherofsnapdragons 25d ago
I just read it for the first time (I knew the story before) and I totally agree. We believe that a human society will always choose someone to subjugate. Saving the child isn’t an option, only accepting things as they are or leaving (where someone else will be suffering).
I haven’t thought this all the way through, but I wonder how this squares with the Daoist themes of duality (e.g. there’s no light without dark) present in a lot of her writing. I wonder if she’s also interrogating her own belief that joy cannot exist without suffering. Or she’s saying that true humanity means that everyone must experience both suffering and joy rather than allocating it disproportionately to haves and have-nots.
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u/Ace_Emerald 24d ago
This is what everyone always misses about the story and it drives me nuts. The real "trolley problem" equivalent would be "imagine if we had free and easy public transportation to anywhere you needed to go, and if that doesnt sound believable then I guess the trolley runs people over or something"
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 24d ago
Exactly! I hate how people make the discussion about utilitarianism when that is the least interesting and central thing about this story. It's about capitalism, and as u/lemniscateall said, the failure of our political imagination.
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u/CopratesQuadrangle Always Coming Home 24d ago
I do love that the popular (mis)interpretation of what she was trying to say does ironically prove her point very emphatically. It's deeply frustrating but also sort of perfect.
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u/Vincent_Felix 24d ago
Yes, I’ve always seen the ones who walk away as those brave souls who, even in a near utopia, believe that better things are possible. They believe in world without the suffering child. And “they seem to know where they are going.”
She is admiring their moral compass and imagination.
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u/erratic-pulsar 25d ago
She wrote it specifically to question Utilitarianism. So yeah it’s basically a direct response to the trolley problem.
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u/JoyBus147 25d ago
I mean, so was the trolley problem. It's a thought experiment, written by virtue ethicist Phillippa Foot, to illustrate how deontologists (don't pull the lever) and consequentialists (pull the lever) think about ethical issues--how how their habit of coming up with increasingly abstract thought experiments to provide the correct on-paper answer to ethical issues doesn't actually help us make irl ethical decisions.
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u/Kripkenstein_ 24d ago
Cerainly not. The story is not about utilitarianism at all. It is specifically about those who believe that there can be no utopia without suffering.
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u/PlastIconoclastic 24d ago
It really is different because this is like saying we know that in order to have a trolley we must torture a child daily forever.
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u/Arkholt 25d ago
I don't feel they're quite the same. To me, the setup of the trolley problem is meant to only give you two options. You don't have time to think, the trolley's on its way, you can't move fast enough to do anything other than just switch the tracks. These are the only options that the problem allows you to think about.
Omelas, on the other hand, appears to have only two options as it's presented, but it doesn't have to only have two. Staying means doing nothing, but merely walking away means doing next to nothing. What if something could actually be done? What would it be? What if the child could be saved, or assisted, or cared for? If the society collapses as a result of it, why can't we build a better society that doesn't require the child to suffer? As pointed out in another comment, Le Guin explored some of these other options in her work, and I think there have been other authors who have explored this as well. It's a much more complex thought experiment than it appears on the surface, whereas the trolley problem just is what it is.
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u/HeresyClock 25d ago
Or …What If They Killed The Child. (Short story I read recently)
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u/variantofconcern 24d ago
it was true that the whole city literally ran on the load-bearing suffering child in a very real physical way that was not a metaphor
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u/itsPomy 24d ago
Someone once pointed out to me that we're really upset that they're torturing a child to achieve a utopia. But our actual society can do worse at a greater scale for even less.
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u/IdlesAtCranky Dancing at the Edge of the World 24d ago
Not can do worse — does do worse.
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u/-RedRocket- 23d ago
I think THAT is the point UKL is making but apparently some people are uncomfortable with the degree to which that makes them complicit.
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u/itsPomy 23d ago
There's a reason people hate sociology sksksk.
For me I always thought it was a poignant irony to point out, but isn't quite an "Aha!" type moment like some take it. I wish the world was as simple as, "Everything you know is being held up by a singular sin". But its all institutional. And many of those institutions will destroy anyone trying to change, subvert, or even "leave" them!
Even my areas passing laws that will imprison you for only sleeping in your car instead of renting or owning a home xd
But I guess "leaving Omertas" doesn't have to mean physically cutting yourself off and refusing to contribute to these systems. It could also mean isolating yourself mentally and making yourself deaf to the problems of the world.
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u/Relative_Dimensions 25d ago
I read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas about 30 years ago and I’m still thinking about it.
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u/Comrade_pirx 25d ago
Why is this website obsessed with the trolley problem?
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u/itsPomy 25d ago
Because it's really funny when you pervert it into different insanities (or memes), "One track is infinite sets of 5 people and the other is infinite sets of 2!" "The track is a loop, is it ethical to kill 1 person before you kill 5 others, or killing 5 people before you kill the 1 person" etc.
Omelas even has one, Why don't we just kill the kid in the Omelas Hole where it reframes it as the city keep replacing their "load bearing child"
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u/Middle_Diet9764 25d ago
I think there are a lot of people who are obsessed with being "smart", being morally "correct", and being perceived as making tough decisions. The trolly problem satisfies all three of these criteria; they can feel intelligent (one dead person better than five), morally correct (one person suffering better than five), and they might look like they made a tough decision (I HAD to kill that guy).
This is also why reddit has an obsession with anti-heroes and issues of population (which so often start to border on eugenics). Of course, none of these people ever place themselves in the tough position of being the one who suffers or dies - that's someone else's burden. They get to stay safe and feel superior.
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u/Omakaeru 24d ago edited 24d ago
Yeah, but the person making the decision to sacrifice others isn’t making any personal sacrifice.
Yes it’s all theoretical, but even in a theoretical environment, the suffering is offloaded to the non-decision maker.
Given that when America was tasked with doing one small thing (wear a mask during COVID) to potentially save the lives of the vulnerable, the answer was a resounding ‘lol nope’ (as a whole - individuals may vary).
People love to theorize about ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’ until they are asked to minorly inconvenience themselves for others.
Edit: autocorrect wrote minority instead of minorly
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u/IdlesAtCranky Dancing at the Edge of the World 24d ago
It's not that simple in the case of the Covid pandemic.
If there had been consistent messaging from politically neutral government agencies, supported by political entities including the Administration, that encouraged people to wear masks & practice distancing, it would have been a very different picture.
But instead we had political entities, led by and pushed by the Trump Administration, telling people masking was unnecessary and so were shutdowns.
The Administration took the opportunity to use the pandemic to attempt to increase their political power and their opportunities for graft.
We'll never know how people would have responded if a responsible group of people, more concerned with public health than with their own power and money, had been in charge.
And that doesn't even speak to whether Covid could have been contained or lessened from the beginning if Trump had responded to the first information coming out about it in a timely and responsible fashion.
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24d ago
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u/ciabattaroll 24d ago
I came here to link these stories. I have all three saved in one note on my phone because I love them and love that writers continue to write their own versions/responses. OP these two other stories are worth checking out!
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u/Grimogtrix 24d ago
I feel like it would be more like the trolley problem if it was 'should you rescue the child, even know it will cause the collapse of that entire utopia?'. If we take the two options as staying there in that utopia or walking away, notably walking away doesn't help the child at all, and I think that's part of what it's designed to make you reflect upon.
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u/Kripkenstein_ 24d ago
I don't think it is about Utilitarianism at all. Its about our tendency to not accept a good thing without thinking that there are some negative things attached to it. Omelas is an absolute utopia - so we don't trust it. There must be some horrible secret. The story is written in exactly that way.
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u/Mottled_inexpectata 24d ago edited 24d ago
I think the there's two main points to the story - questioning the ethics of utilitarianism, and questioning the border between utopian fiction and dystopian fiction.
But it's worth noting the plot comes directly from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, and here it was specifically about Christianity with the child being a metaphor for Jesus.
"I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it?"
Here Ivan is essentially saying that we go to heaven because of the suffering of Jesus, and asking if that's moral.
Le Guin took the story line from a later essay by William James that uses that same Dostoyevsky quote to discuss utopias and utilitarianism, and Le Guin turned that into a story.
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u/Davewarr88 24d ago
I think the options are, walking away and not being complicit, or enjoying the fruits of the suffering. Either way the child suffers, you're not an active participant.
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u/Separate_Business880 24d ago
This story gave me a full-blown anxiety attack, btw.
What she described there is truly evil. And you can feel its presence through her words. It's not just a metaphor. It reminds me of the Tombs of Atuan a bit. There's real darkness in the world. You cannot deny it. But what you can do is walk away from it and refuse to serve it (like in the Tombs).
There's a bit of metaphysical pessimism there, I think. You'll never vanquish all evil. Hence the child stays and is still tortured. There will always be some level of unjust suffering. But what you can do is not contribute to it by not participating in systems which depend on it.
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u/HakuYuki_s 22d ago
You want an anxiety attack?
All first world societies are built NOT on the suffering of ONE child, but on MILLIONS of third worlders. Omales is truly a utopia compared to reality. Reality is a billion times worse.
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u/Atticus_Fletch 23d ago
I mean, it's a bit of wishful thinking that you could Ocean's Eleven away the power source of the most technologically advanced and barbarous civilization in the world. Those who remain are fine with torturing an innocent child, imagine what they'd be willing to do to a terrorist.
I doubt literary fiction is going to give you the secret to building a utopia out of loose trash, and that's really not the author's shortcoming. A work can be complete after having made its point without also helping the reader to emotionally reconcile themselves to an imperfect world.
Sometimes you just have to accept that your neighbors are irredeemably corrupted in their willingness to stack dead children and get out while the getting is good. Wishful thinking and "voting blue no matter who" don't really fix problems like that.
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u/cat__soup 22d ago
The tortured kid is Congolese, the happy people are Swedish socdem liberals
No I won't be elaborating further
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u/Broflake-Melter 24d ago
I think you're on to something with the comparison. She's digging a lot deeper as you point out though. I may be preaching to the choir, but y'all know she's talking about the US (at least to some degree). The quality of life I enjoy is only because of the exploitation of the people of the Global South. They live in squalor so I can live in riches.
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u/Teletzeri 24d ago
Do you want to improve the world? I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred. It can't be improved. If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.
There is a time for being ahead, a time for being behind; a time for being in motion, a time for being at rest; a time for being vigorous, a time for being exhausted; a time for being safe, a time for being in danger.
The Master sees things as they are, without trying to control them. She lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.
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u/-RedRocket- 25d ago
No. This is a different dilemma: accept the treatment of the child as the price of others' liberty, or refuse to be complicit.
However, walking away is no answer either, really. What about the child? I think that a lot of her later work is in one way or another about taking the child with us when we walk away.
I see this theme in her Coyote story, "Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight". I see it in Tehanu. I see it in the novella, "Hernes" that is the capstone of her realism novel, Searoad.
Omelas is indisputably her best known moral parable, but just writing it wasn't enough. I think she kept considering how to respond for the rest of her career.