I’m certainly beginning to hate that story. Those who walked away from Omelas were morally blameless but they didn’t help that kid and they probably walked to somewhere much worse.
And even if they didn't - they tolerated the situation, didn't try to change it, did nothing for the child, just kept themselves all pure by leaving.
It's just a rotten sanctimonious self-righteous piece of twaddle.
No, it's explicitly stated that people *believe* that the child must exist for people to be happy, and she challenges the reader directly that this makes more intuitive sense somehow than just utopia. Omelas is a metaphor for capitalism.
But it's not a false choice. Resources are constrained.
I mean, "complaining about the leadership of Omelas while also refusing to abandon the material comforts and protections that its fundamental injustice grants you" is hardly "walking away."
You can interpret the text beyond its extremely simple plain meaning.
Yeah, and if you want to push the parallel: the thought process is "by standing back and letting fascism take over, I am abandoning the material comforts and protections of hypocritical bourgeois democracy, and therefore am even more moral"
Doesn't quite work, because, fundamentally, it's still a situation where you're refusing to acknowledge that you're valuing your personal discomfort over the deaths and suffering of other people - except a tide of fascism is going to spread *way* more suffering and death than the alternative.
Really, it's "I am punishing Omelas by replacing it by a worse and more cruel system". Which is not a more moral position, it is a worse one. People who support Assad and Putin are not moral purists
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It's just a rotten sanctimonious self-righteous piece of twaddle.
It can never be walked away from, only confronted.
But it's not a false choice. Resources are constrained.
You can interpret the text beyond its extremely simple plain meaning.