Those Who Walk Away From Omelas Analysis

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Those Who Walk Away from Omelas encourages students to face the dark side of modern civilization and utilitarianism. It tells of a nearly perfect city, where most everyone is happy. They lead cultured, complex, fulfilling lives. The reader is told to imagine it as they wish; let it have whatever amount of technology they want, to add in things they think would make the city better, and generally make the city as good as is believable to the reader. The one flaw of the city is that its well-being depends on a single child be kept in torturous solitude. The child is innocent, desperate, and remembers life in the city, but cannot be allowed any kindness whatsoever. This puts forth the question of whether such a city is morally …show more content…
Diseases or toxic chemicals are often able to get through. One of the biggest polluters, mining, also more seriously harms people of developing nations. Gathering conflict resources often involves illegal taxing by armed forces or extortion of resources. Armed forces sometimes even force people to work using murder, threats of death, rape, or amputation. Being an amputee is much harder in Africa because more of the work available is physical. Also, people in Africa tend to blame amputees rather than sympathetically donating more. There are fair trade and conflict free resources and many companies offer products made with said resources. Even without conflict resources many people live on less than 2 USD equivalent a day. There are many charities people could donate to provide assistance to the less fortunate. Some provide direct relief in the form of food or water. Others try to give a more long term solution such as building wells, water treatment facilities, or giving small loans to help kickstart income generation. Governments and organizations in developed nations also try to help poorer nations. All of these come at a cost of to the wealthy, however. The lost time, extra effort expended or …show more content…
The author feels it should, suggesting it’s morally reprehensible to profit from another’s misery by having some characters walk away from Omelas. One may think the real world is different since a poor person would likely enjoy a set amount of additional resources more than a wealthier person. However, a form utilitarianism still supports allowing suffering. The Western world has resources to donate because of technological advances. This required money and time being put into research and development. Taking money out of our economy to be spent on the poor would reduce spending on engineering. Even if money that’s not spent on rapidly advancing technologies still promote R&D by incentivising refinement of existing methods of production. It also gives producers more money to spend on things that do lead to more spending on science and engineering. This development will eventually lead to a stronger society that is able to take care more people than we could today. The city of Omelas is depicted as either very advanced technologically so it wouldn’t need any more research or fairly one with nature, better without engineering, depending on the preference of the reader. An even greater problem facing charitable people is population growth. Nations have a certain amount of people they can feed. This typically