Some businessman wrote a book of advice called “Never Eat Alone”, the title of which means that every meal is an opportunity to have a meal with someone to network with. That is what the saying “he who would be Pope must think of nothing else” looks like in practice. Not wearing oneself out like Superman in the SMBC cartoon, driven into self-imposed slavery by memetic immune disorder.
Actually, I think that the world described in that SMBC cartoon is far preferable to the standard DC comics world with Superman. I do not think that doing what Superman did there is a memetic immune disorder, but rather a (successful) attempt to make the world a better place.
I definitely wouldn’t. A single tormented child seems to me like an incredibly good tradeoff for the number of very high quality lives that Omelas supports, much better than we get with real cities.
It sucks to actually be the person whose well-being is being sacrificed for everyone else, but if you’re deciding from behind a veil of ignorance which society to be a part of, your expected well being is going to be higher in Omelas.
Back when I was eleven or so, I contemplated this, and made a precommitment that if I were ever in a situation where I’m offered a chance to improve total wellfare for everyone at the cost of personal torment, I should take it immediately without giving myself any time to contemplate what I’d be getting myself into, so in that sense I’ve effectively volunteered myself to be the tormented child.
I don’t disagree with maximally efficient altruism, just with the idea that it’s sensible to judge entertainment only as an instrumental value in service of productivity.
It sucks to actually be the person whose well-being is being sacrificed for everyone else, but if you’re deciding from behind a veil of ignorance which society to be a part of, your expected well being is going to be higher in Omelas.
You’re assuming here that the “veil of ignorance” gives you exactly equal chance of being each citizen of Omelas, so that a decision under the veil reduces to average utilitarianism.
However, in Rawls’s formulation, you’re not supposed to assume that; the veil means you’re also entirely ignorant about the mechanism used to incarnate you as one of the citizens, and so must consider all probability distributions over the citizens when choosing your society. In particular, you must assign some weight to a distribution picked by a devil (or mischievous Omega) who will find the person with the very lowest utility in your choice of society and incarnate you as that person. So you wouldn’t choose Omelas.
This seems to be why Rawls preferred maximin decision theory under the veil of ignorance rather than expected utility decision theory.
In that case, don’t use a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, it’s not the best mechanism for addressing the decision. A veil where you have an equal chance of your own child being the victim to anyone else’s (assuming you’re already too old to be the victim) is more the sort of situation anyone actually deciding whether or not to live in Omelas would face.
Of course, I would pick Omelas even under the Rawlsian veil, since as I’ve said I’m willing to be the one who takes the hit.
Ah, so you are considering the question “If Omelas already exists, should I choose to live there or walk away?” rather than the Rawlsian question “Should we create a society like Omelas in the first place?” The “veil of ignorance” meme nearly always refers to the Rawlsian concept, so I misunderstood you there.
Incidentally, I reread the story and there seems to be no description of how the child was selected in the first place or how he/she is replaced. So it’s not clear that your own child does have the same chance of being the victim as anyone else’s.
Well, as I mentioned in another comment some time ago (not in this thread,) I support both not walking away from Omelas, and also creating Omelases unless an even more utility efficient method of creating happy and functional societies is forthcoming.
Our society rests on a lot more suffering than Omelas, not just in an incidental way (such as people within our cities who don’t have housing or medical care,) but directly, through channels such as economic slavery where companies rely on workers, mainly abroad, who they keep locked in debt, who could not leave to seek employment elsewhere even if they wanted to and other opportunities were forthcoming. I can respect a moral code that would lead people to walk out on Omelas as a form of protest that would also lead people to walk out on modern society to live on a self sufficient seasteading colony, but I reject the notion that Omelas is worse than, or as bad as, our own society, in a morally relevant way.
A single tormented child seems to me like an incredibly good tradeoff for the number of very high quality lives that Omelas supports, much better than we get with real cities.
I cannot fathom why a comment like that would be upvoted by anyone but an unfeeling robot. This is not even the dust-specks-vs-torture case, given that the Omelas is not a very large city.
if I were ever in a situation where I’m offered a chance to improve total wellfare for everyone at the cost of personal torment, I should take it immediately
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice. Would you shrug and say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that your mommy/daddy can live a happy life”? I know what I would do.
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice. Would you shrug and say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that your mommy/daddy can live a happy life”?
I hope I would have the strength to say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that everyone in the city can live a happy life.” Doing it just for myself and my own social circle wouldn’t be a good tradeoff, but those aren’t the terms of the scenario.
Considering how many of our basic commodities rely on sweatshop or otherwise extremely miserable labor, we’re already living off the backs of quite a lot of tormented children.
The Babyeaters’ babies outnumber the adults; their situation is analogous, not to the city of Omelas, but to a utopian city built on top of another, even larger, dystopian city, on which it relies for its existence.
I would rather live in a society where people loved and cherished their children, but also valued their society, and were willing to shut up and multiply and take the hit themselves, or to their own loved ones, for the sake of a common good that really is that much greater, and I want to be the sort of person I’d want others in that society to be.
I’ve never had children, but I have been in love, in a reciprocated relationship of the sort where it feels like it’s actually as big a deal as all the love songs have ever made it out to be, and I think that sacrificing someone I loved for the sake of a city like Omelas is something I’d be willing to do in practice, not just in theory (and she never would have expected me to do differently, nor would I of her.) It’s definitely not the case that really loving someone, with true depth of feeling, precludes acknowledgment that there are some things worth sacrificing even that bond for.
I’m guessing that neither have most of those who upvoted you and downvoted me. I literally cannot imagine a worse betrayal than the scenario we’ve been discussing. I can imagine one kind-of-happy society where something like this would be OK, though.
I cannot fathom why a comment like that would be upvoted by anyone but an unfeeling robot.
Sounds like you need to update your model of people who don’t have children. Also, how aggressively do you campaign against things like sweatshop labor in third-world countries, which as Desrtopa correctly points out are a substantially worse real-world analogue? Do children only matter if they’re your children?
the real problem with omelas: It totally ignores the fact that there are children suffering literally as we speak in every city on the planet. Omelas somehow managed to get it down to one child. How many other children would you sacrifice for your own?
the real problem with omelas: It totally ignores the fact that there are children suffering literally as we speak in every city on the planet.
Unlike in the fictional Omelas, there is no direct dependence or direct sacrifice. Certainly it is possible to at least temporarily alleviate suffering of others in this non-hypothetical world by sacrificing some of your fortune, but that’s the difference between active and passive approach, there is a large gap there.
Related. Nornagest put their finger on this being a conflict between the consequentially compelling (optimizing for general welfare) and the psychologically compelling (not being confronted with knowledge of an individual child suffering torture because of you). I think Nornagest’s also right that a fully specified Omelas scenario would almost certainly feel less compelling, which is one reason I’m not much impressed by Le Guin’s story.
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice.
The situation is not analogous, since sacrificing one’s child would presumably make most parents miserable for the rest of their days. In Omelas, however, the sacrifice makes people happy, instead.
I don’t disagree with maximally efficient altruism, just with the idea that it’s sensible to judge entertainment only as an instrumental value in service of productivity.
As I said in previous comments, I am genuinely not sure whether entertainment is a good terminal goal to have.
By analogy, I absolutely require sleep in order to be productive at all in any capacity; but if I could swallow a magic pill that removed my need for sleep (with no other side-effects), I’d do so in a heartbeat. Sleep is an instrumental goal for me, not a terminal one. But I don’t know if entertainment is like that or not.
Thus, I’m really interested in hearing more about your thoughts on the topic.
I’m not sure that I would regard entertainment as a terminal goal, but I’m very sure I wouldn’t regard productivity as one. As an instrumental goal, it’s an intermediary between a lot of things that I care about, but optimizing for productivity seems like about as worthy a goal to me as paperclipping.
Right, agreed, but “productivity” is just a rough estimate of how quickly you’re moving towards your actual goals. If entertainment is not one of them, then either it enhances your productivity in some way, or it reduces it, or it has no effect (which is unlikely, IMO).
Productivity and fun aren’t orthogonal; for example, it is entirely possible that if your goal is “experience as much pleasure as possible”, then some amount of entertainment would directly contribute to the goal, and would thus be productive. That said, though, I can’t claim that such a goal would be a good goal to have in the first place.
Actually, I think that the world described in that SMBC cartoon is far preferable to the standard DC comics world with Superman. I do not think that doing what Superman did there is a memetic immune disorder, but rather a (successful) attempt to make the world a better place.
You would, then, not walk away from Omelas?
I definitely wouldn’t. A single tormented child seems to me like an incredibly good tradeoff for the number of very high quality lives that Omelas supports, much better than we get with real cities.
It sucks to actually be the person whose well-being is being sacrificed for everyone else, but if you’re deciding from behind a veil of ignorance which society to be a part of, your expected well being is going to be higher in Omelas.
Back when I was eleven or so, I contemplated this, and made a precommitment that if I were ever in a situation where I’m offered a chance to improve total wellfare for everyone at the cost of personal torment, I should take it immediately without giving myself any time to contemplate what I’d be getting myself into, so in that sense I’ve effectively volunteered myself to be the tormented child.
I don’t disagree with maximally efficient altruism, just with the idea that it’s sensible to judge entertainment only as an instrumental value in service of productivity.
You’re assuming here that the “veil of ignorance” gives you exactly equal chance of being each citizen of Omelas, so that a decision under the veil reduces to average utilitarianism.
However, in Rawls’s formulation, you’re not supposed to assume that; the veil means you’re also entirely ignorant about the mechanism used to incarnate you as one of the citizens, and so must consider all probability distributions over the citizens when choosing your society. In particular, you must assign some weight to a distribution picked by a devil (or mischievous Omega) who will find the person with the very lowest utility in your choice of society and incarnate you as that person. So you wouldn’t choose Omelas.
This seems to be why Rawls preferred maximin decision theory under the veil of ignorance rather than expected utility decision theory.
In that case, don’t use a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, it’s not the best mechanism for addressing the decision. A veil where you have an equal chance of your own child being the victim to anyone else’s (assuming you’re already too old to be the victim) is more the sort of situation anyone actually deciding whether or not to live in Omelas would face.
Of course, I would pick Omelas even under the Rawlsian veil, since as I’ve said I’m willing to be the one who takes the hit.
Ah, so you are considering the question “If Omelas already exists, should I choose to live there or walk away?” rather than the Rawlsian question “Should we create a society like Omelas in the first place?” The “veil of ignorance” meme nearly always refers to the Rawlsian concept, so I misunderstood you there.
Incidentally, I reread the story and there seems to be no description of how the child was selected in the first place or how he/she is replaced. So it’s not clear that your own child does have the same chance of being the victim as anyone else’s.
Well, as I mentioned in another comment some time ago (not in this thread,) I support both not walking away from Omelas, and also creating Omelases unless an even more utility efficient method of creating happy and functional societies is forthcoming.
Our society rests on a lot more suffering than Omelas, not just in an incidental way (such as people within our cities who don’t have housing or medical care,) but directly, through channels such as economic slavery where companies rely on workers, mainly abroad, who they keep locked in debt, who could not leave to seek employment elsewhere even if they wanted to and other opportunities were forthcoming. I can respect a moral code that would lead people to walk out on Omelas as a form of protest that would also lead people to walk out on modern society to live on a self sufficient seasteading colony, but I reject the notion that Omelas is worse than, or as bad as, our own society, in a morally relevant way.
I cannot fathom why a comment like that would be upvoted by anyone but an unfeeling robot. This is not even the dust-specks-vs-torture case, given that the Omelas is not a very large city.
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice. Would you shrug and say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that your mommy/daddy can live a happy life”? I know what I would do.
I hope I would have the strength to say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that everyone in the city can live a happy life.” Doing it just for myself and my own social circle wouldn’t be a good tradeoff, but those aren’t the terms of the scenario.
Considering how many of our basic commodities rely on sweatshop or otherwise extremely miserable labor, we’re already living off the backs of quite a lot of tormented children.
And there I thought that Babyeaters lived only in the Eliezer’s sci-fi story...
The Babyeaters’ babies outnumber the adults; their situation is analogous, not to the city of Omelas, but to a utopian city built on top of another, even larger, dystopian city, on which it relies for its existence.
I would rather live in a society where people loved and cherished their children, but also valued their society, and were willing to shut up and multiply and take the hit themselves, or to their own loved ones, for the sake of a common good that really is that much greater, and I want to be the sort of person I’d want others in that society to be.
I’ve never had children, but I have been in love, in a reciprocated relationship of the sort where it feels like it’s actually as big a deal as all the love songs have ever made it out to be, and I think that sacrificing someone I loved for the sake of a city like Omelas is something I’d be willing to do in practice, not just in theory (and she never would have expected me to do differently, nor would I of her.) It’s definitely not the case that really loving someone, with true depth of feeling, precludes acknowledgment that there are some things worth sacrificing even that bond for.
I’m guessing that neither have most of those who upvoted you and downvoted me. I literally cannot imagine a worse betrayal than the scenario we’ve been discussing. I can imagine one kind-of-happy society where something like this would be OK, though.
Sounds like you need to update your model of people who don’t have children. Also, how aggressively do you campaign against things like sweatshop labor in third-world countries, which as Desrtopa correctly points out are a substantially worse real-world analogue? Do children only matter if they’re your children?
the real problem with omelas: It totally ignores the fact that there are children suffering literally as we speak in every city on the planet. Omelas somehow managed to get it down to one child. How many other children would you sacrifice for your own?
Unlike in the fictional Omelas, there is no direct dependence or direct sacrifice. Certainly it is possible to at least temporarily alleviate suffering of others in this non-hypothetical world by sacrificing some of your fortune, but that’s the difference between active and passive approach, there is a large gap there.
Related. Nornagest put their finger on this being a conflict between the consequentially compelling (optimizing for general welfare) and the psychologically compelling (not being confronted with knowledge of an individual child suffering torture because of you). I think Nornagest’s also right that a fully specified Omelas scenario would almost certainly feel less compelling, which is one reason I’m not much impressed by Le Guin’s story.
The situation is not analogous, since sacrificing one’s child would presumably make most parents miserable for the rest of their days. In Omelas, however, the sacrifice makes people happy, instead.
And I thought that the Babyeaters only existed in Eliezer’s fiction...
As I said in previous comments, I am genuinely not sure whether entertainment is a good terminal goal to have.
By analogy, I absolutely require sleep in order to be productive at all in any capacity; but if I could swallow a magic pill that removed my need for sleep (with no other side-effects), I’d do so in a heartbeat. Sleep is an instrumental goal for me, not a terminal one. But I don’t know if entertainment is like that or not.
Thus, I’m really interested in hearing more about your thoughts on the topic.
I’m not sure that I would regard entertainment as a terminal goal, but I’m very sure I wouldn’t regard productivity as one. As an instrumental goal, it’s an intermediary between a lot of things that I care about, but optimizing for productivity seems like about as worthy a goal to me as paperclipping.
Right, agreed, but “productivity” is just a rough estimate of how quickly you’re moving towards your actual goals. If entertainment is not one of them, then either it enhances your productivity in some way, or it reduces it, or it has no effect (which is unlikely, IMO).
Productivity and fun aren’t orthogonal; for example, it is entirely possible that if your goal is “experience as much pleasure as possible”, then some amount of entertainment would directly contribute to the goal, and would thus be productive. That said, though, I can’t claim that such a goal would be a good goal to have in the first place.