Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 31: Stay In Omelas

A note on the story by Ursula Le Guin

"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," is a short story by Ursula Le Guin which tells of a society called Omelas where everything goes well. Everything is nice; Le Guin spends pages describing just how nice everything is. However, there is a catch—in Omelas the idyllic society relies on the torture of a small child, who must not be helped in any ways for the society to function.

Whether Omelas was intended as a reductio to utilitarianism is subject to significant debate—see this blog post for example. However, regardless of whether it’s intended as a reductio to utilitarianism, it has been provided as an alleged counterexample, and it is thus worth addressing.

In the original short story, Le Guin doesn’t talk about destroying Omelas; instead, she talks about leaving Omelas, and based on the phrasing, seems to endorse walking away from Omelas. I’ve always found this quite baffling. After all, leaving Omelas does not benefit the child in the slightest. It merely causes people to be worse off for no reason. This view isn’t defensible.

However, the more common view that’s touted as a reductio to utilitarianism is utilitarianism would deny the (allegedly) intuitive view that one should destroy Omelas, if given the opportunity. I’ve also found this view baffling, but perhaps far less so than the original “one should walk away” view.

Several things are worth noting. For one, even on plausible moderate threshold views like those of Huemer, one shouldn’t destroy Omelas. Given that the utility of torturing one child is so enormous that it outweighs the harm of rights violation, a moderate deontologist would have to hold that view that one shouldn’t destroy Omelas—or indeed, even the stronger view that one should create Omelas.

Secondly, our society currently is far worse than Omelas. There are lots of children currently being tortured in basements. Thus, if Omelas currently shouldn’t exist, neither should our society as it exists right now.

Third, one would choose to be in Omelas from behind the veil of ignorance. The expected value of a 1 in (some big number) chance of being tortured for a (Some big number minus 1)/ (some big number chance of having a great life).

Fourth, we can arrive at the conclusion that Omelas is good. As I’ve already argued, there are some number of dust specks that are worse than a single torture. If that’s true, then to hold that Omelas is a bad society, one would have to hold that a utopia where people get dust specks in their eyes is bad overall, because of the dust specks.

Fifth if we accept

A) A perfectly rational, omniscient, benevolent third party observer would, if choosing between two worlds, pick the better one.

B) A world where Omelas is caused to exist is better than a world where it isn’t.

C) One should take actions that a perfectly rational, omniscient, benevolent third party observer would pick

Then we’d have to accept

D) One should cause Omelas to exist.

Each premise is plausible. A is almost true by definition; what would it mean to be a better world if a perfectly moral, all knowing third party would prefer the worse world. B is also plausible; nearly all consequentialists would agree that Omelas is good, and B only requires consideration of the consequences. C is also very plausible—it would be bizarre to hold that a perfect being would hope for you to act wrongly. If this were true, then putting perfect beings in charge of more things could make things worse.

Our anti Omelas intuitions can be explained away. For one, it’s very easy to have scope neglect, ignoring the benefits to truly vast numbers of people. All of the biases that I describe here and here also apply. It’s very difficult to think from the perspective of a society, particularly when an author has tried in maximally gory detail to describe just how bad life is for one person. As Huemer notes, humans are notoriously terrible at adding up vast numbers of small benefits.

On top of this, I just don’t think Omelas is that repugnant. If people appreciate that this society is much better than ours and has a miniscule fraction of the torture in our society (!), it begins to seem much more intuitive. It’s only Le Guin’s good writing that disguises the weakness of the intuition. To hold that Omelas is bad, one has to hold that our society would be sufficiently bad that it shouldn’t exist, even if we got rid of every single problem that exists in our society today, with the exception of the torture of one child. That view is the radically unintuitive one.

So my friends, stay in Omelas. Do not let Le Guin’s fearmongering propaganda scare you away! Don’t be the ones who walk away from Omelas.