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.
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.