My own reading of Omelas: The scenario at the end has the child being sacrificed for the good of the rest of society. But the lesson to be learned from that depends on who you’re supposed to identify with. If you identify with the society, the reader is being lectured on not hurting people for his own gain. But if you identify with the child, the moral of the story is that it’s wrong for other people to ask you to sacrifice things for the good of society. The moral that was obviously intended was the first of these—this kind of story tends to lecture the reader, and “you need to be less selfish” is one of the most common morals in existence. Nobody writes a story whose moral is that you should be selfish and ignore the greater good, but the story unintentionally says exactly that.
Nobody writes a story whose moral is that you should be selfish and ignore the greater good,
This seems obviously false. Ayn Rand comes to mind as the most iconic example, but eg Camus’ The Stranger also had this as a major theme, as does various self-help books. It is also the implicit moral of JJ Thompson’s violinist thought-experiment. My impression from reading summaries is that it’s also a common theme for early 20th century Japanese novels (though I don’t like them so I never read one myself).
I didn’t mean that there’s literally no such thing whatsoever. But “be selfish and ignore the greater good” is constantly derided and is rarely even accepted, let alone presented as a good moral. The whole reason the rationalism community is tied to EA is rejection of selfishness.
Obviously self-help books are an exception, in the same way that pro-murder books are an exception to “murder isn’t widely accepted”.
My own reading of Omelas: The scenario at the end has the child being sacrificed for the good of the rest of society. But the lesson to be learned from that depends on who you’re supposed to identify with. If you identify with the society, the reader is being lectured on not hurting people for his own gain. But if you identify with the child, the moral of the story is that it’s wrong for other people to ask you to sacrifice things for the good of society. The moral that was obviously intended was the first of these—this kind of story tends to lecture the reader, and “you need to be less selfish” is one of the most common morals in existence. Nobody writes a story whose moral is that you should be selfish and ignore the greater good, but the story unintentionally says exactly that.
This seems obviously false. Ayn Rand comes to mind as the most iconic example, but eg Camus’ The Stranger also had this as a major theme, as does various self-help books. It is also the implicit moral of JJ Thompson’s violinist thought-experiment. My impression from reading summaries is that it’s also a common theme for early 20th century Japanese novels (though I don’t like them so I never read one myself).
I didn’t mean that there’s literally no such thing whatsoever. But “be selfish and ignore the greater good” is constantly derided and is rarely even accepted, let alone presented as a good moral. The whole reason the rationalism community is tied to EA is rejection of selfishness.
Obviously self-help books are an exception, in the same way that pro-murder books are an exception to “murder isn’t widely accepted”.
Do you want to come up with some other “obvious exceptions” to your “Nobody says X” claim?
Tbh, I find this comment kinda bizarre.
Nobody means literally nobody by “nobody says X”.