The Child in the Broom Closet

Ursula Le Guin's “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” tells the tale of a city, Omelas, where the happiness and well-being of its inhabitants depend on a small child being constrained to and humiliated in a small, putrid broom closet. It is critical to Le Guin's fiction-based ethical wager that Omelas's happiness is not ideological in Louis Althusser's sense nor is it naive. It is experientially unmediated, materially substantive, and morally desirable. This happiness is what every average Joe and moral philosopher would wish for, but it nevertheless depends on a child's being constrained and humiliated in a cramped space and on this being known by all Omelas inhabitants. Some actually visit the child's fetid chamber. Some have merely heard of it since they were children themselves. Every member of Omelas, however, must assume some relationship among his or her present personal happiness, the present happiness of the millions inhabiting Omelas, and the present suffering of one small human being. Some offer facile excuses for preferring their happiness to the child's. At this point, they reason, the child is “too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy.” She is so destroyed and so used to her destitution that liberating her would do more harm than good. Others face the true paradox. For them “their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.” Others leave Omelas but not en masse.