Learn To Craft Case Studies On Those Who Walk Away From Omelas With This Example

The short story Those Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula Le Guin explores a strong ethical issue and poses an important question of the value of human life and happiness which does not have obvious answers. In the presented situation, several groups of people can be picked out as stakeholders. They are the child in misery, the town government who imprisoned the child and keeps him there, the one or ones who have set such terms and enforce their consequences, and all other inhabitants and citizens of Omelas who know about the issue.
Obviously, the main ethical issue is the prosperity of the town at the cost of the child's happiness. From one point of view, the whole city and all its citizens experience wellbeing and happiness at the cost of one person's happiness. From the other point, the child lives in terrible misery which will continue until the end of his life, while prosperity can be achieved without such sacrifices.
In my opinion, the most unethical are the ones or the one who has set up such terms with the Omelas officials and makes sure all the consequences of the actions really take place (provide wellbeing, monitor child's misery, and destroy prosperity in the case of violation).
This story also criticizes the way our own society functions. This criticism is not perfectly obvious but is rather subtle. The child in misery symbolizes the third world countries whose prosperity is sacrificed to ensure the wellbeing of the "golden billion" (citizens of Omelas). Indeed, the modern Western civilization and its economic and societal success are based on the extremely cheap, almost slave labor of the citizens of third world countries.
In my opinion, the prosperity of the whole society should be based on harmonized individual efforts of all the members of society, not on elite feasting on others' misery or hard labor. And the issue is not only in harsh conditions for the oppressed, the oppressors themselves perhaps experience even greater loss. Instead of mastering their skills, abilities, and knowledge they put efforts into maintaining "status quo" and end up being very unhappy.