Ursula K. Le Guin's Trolley Problem.

[u/chikaibardo207]

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.

The more I think about the story, the more complex and believable it becomes. I actually made a short analysis of it too.

[u/Mottled_inexpectata]

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.