[reubenmorais]

Which principles would you choose in order to construct Omelia? Who gets to be tortured? How do you make sure they don't have enough friends and family suffering about their predicament to skew off your statistics? How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery?

I think one finds oneself very quickly having to come up with bizarre arbitrary (and unjust) rules to try and build such a statistical monstrosity.

[lolc]

Thank you for putting it that way. I was always confused by the Omelas story, what people got out of it.

[rbanffy]

There’s an excellent Star Trek episode around this precise theme (of course there is). They come up with a fable that the person to be tortured is the most important person and that being tortured for life is a privilege reserved only to the very best amongst them. Many societies did that with human sacrifices, framing the sacrifice as an honour rather than a burden, and without any utopian results.

[Dracophoenix]

> How come one million prosperous individuals can't get together to lift one out of misery?

Because the foundation of their happiness is predicated on taking someone else's. It's an end result of a political system built on utilitarian morality. Although La Guinn may disagree with the comparison, taxes are a close real-life parallel.