"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" (Variations on a theme by William James) is a short fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is a parable (Le Guin calls it a "psychomyth"); although not an allegory. It has no plot, no characters, no dialogue; merely a setting, the city Omelas. It is often used in discussing the nature and adequacy of Utilitarian theories of justice.

In the parable, Omelas is a utopian city of happiness and delight, whose inhabitants are intelligent, cultured and refined. Everything about Omelas is pleasing, except for the secret of its happiness: the good fortune of Omelas requires that an unfortunate child be kept in filth, darkness and misery, and that all her citizens know of this on coming of age.

Some of them walk away; so, by implication, does the author; the parable ends "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

"The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat," writes Le Guin, "turns up in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the idea. But when I met it in James's 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,' it was with a shock of recognition." Le Guin hit upon the name of the town on seeing a road sign for Salem, Oregon, in a car mirror. "People ask me 'Where do you get your ideas from, Ms. Le Guin?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?"

The quote from William James is:

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far‑off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

External links

• The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life

American short stories | Salem, Oregon | Short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin | Hugo Award winning works