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Sample Essay
1. Does the story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” successfully defeat
utilitarianism? In answering this, you should discuss (a) whether the utilitarian is
committed to holding that it is morally right to keep the child in those conditions,
and (b) whether there is a plausible utilitarian response.
Thesis: Ursula Leguin's story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, fails to
successfully defeat utilitarianism because the scenario proposed has little
relevance to any real-world situation, and has the counterproductive effect of
exposing moral weaknesses within our own society.
In the story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula Leguin presents a
scenario in which an entire city's population can experience an extremely pure
form of happiness, so long as one child lives in a constant state of wretched
misery (229). The specific reasons and mechanisms that led to the creation and
maintenance of this situation are left deliberately vague, allowing the reader to
focus on the emotional states of the parties involved. Leguin does this in order to
paint a picture of a utilitarian utopia – a world in which the well-being of the vast
majority can be guaranteed through the suffering of a very few. The reader is
then invited to evaluate the ethical nature of this society, thus testing the validity
of a strictly utilitarian morality.
The major reason for this failure is Leguin’s overuse of ambiguity, and her
choice to leave specifics of the situation open to the interpretation of the
reader. This approach allows for a dramatic illustration of a theoretical
consequence of utilitarian ideology, however, the scenario is so far-fetched that it
is very difficult to evaluate intuitively on moral grounds. The reader is asked
whether it is worth forcing a child to live in its own feces (229), so that one can
live in a society in which “... beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering
themselves like divine soufflés to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the
flesh” (227). The former sounds horrible, but the latter sounds pretty good, but
since the reader has probably never experienced either, he/she is not a
competent judge and cannot take a stand with any strong conviction.
Works Cited
Leguin, Ursula. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". The Winds Twelve
Quarters. US: Harper & Row Publishers, 1975, pp 224 - 231.
Tiffany, Evan. “Slides for the unit on Utilitarianism”.
http://www.sfu.ca/~etiffany/teaching/phil120/120.html. 2003.