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.
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.