Question

The Ones That Walk Away From Omelas Text

Please click on the link and read the following article -->https://docs.google.com/document/d/12n5cYjWs635zIapXxOSiRkTk2SjUWraGZRaoVCpwjfk/edit?usp=sharing

Then answer the following question with a 200 word minimum response. You should show that you have a good understanding over the subject of Utilitarianism.

1) How can this short story be considered a critique of Utilitarianism? Is it a fair critique?

Answer 1

"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a short philosophical fiction by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. With deliberately both vague and vivid descripitions.The narrator depicts a summer festival in the utopian city of Omelas, whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery

The chronological element of the work is that it begins by describing the first day of summer in Omelas, a shimmering city of unbelievable happiness & delight. In Omelas, the summer solstice is celebrated with a glorious festival & a race featuring young people on horseback. The vibrant festival atmosphere, seems to be an everyday characteristic of the blissful community, whose citizens, though limited in their advanced technology to communal resources, are still intelligent, sophisticated, & cultured. Omelas has no kings, soldiers, priests, or slaves. The specific socio-politico-economic setup of the community is not mentioned, but the narrator merely explains that the reader cannot be sure of every particular of a single child.

Everything about Omelas is abundantly pleasing that the narrator decides the reader is not yet truly convinced of its existence and thus elaborates upon one final element of the city: ie - its one atrocity . The city's constant state of serenity & splendor requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness, & misery.

Once citizens are old enough to know the truth, most, though initially shocked & disgusted, ultimately to this one injustice that secures the happiness of the rest of the city. A few citizens, young & old, silently walk away from the city,& thus no one knows where they go. The writing ends with "The place they go towards is aplace even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

The quote from William James is:if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain

Le Guin noted that The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas "has a long and happy career of being used by teachers to upset students and make them argue fiercely about morality.

A utilitarian would point to how much happiness the citizens of Omelas experience in order to justify its system of governance, in assessing an action values the utilitarian uses.Which leads as acritique of utilitarianism.