Sep 6, 2026 · 17 min · 7 segments
Official podcast Channel of Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP - The Ninth Archbishop of Sydney. Here you will find his Sunday Homilies, and regular addresses delivered on a wide range of religious, ethics…
Anthony FisherHost
In 1973, the American writer Ursula Le Guin published a short work of philosophical fiction, The Ones Who Walk Away from the Omnilus.
Though limited in technology and resources, the citizens of this utopia are intelligent, cultured, and free of overlords and slaves, enemies, soldiers and priests.
The serenity and splendour require that a single unfortunate child be locked up in perpetual darkness, malnourished and miserable.
When the citizens discover this, most react with disgust at first, but then they acquiesce in this one injustice that secures the happiness of all the rest.
The few that are unwilling to accept the macabre terms of this happiness became the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Specifically, the unsophisticated pragmatism that says you can do a bit of evil for the sake of some good.
And the more erudite calculus of the utilitarians that justifies even great evils.
Le Guin was inspired to write her story after reading an essay by the philosopher William James, who posed a similar moral dilemma.
But there's another striking parallel to Ivan in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov.
who asks Alyosha whether one could build a world of happiness knowing its foundation relied upon the torture of an innocent child.
Christians, Dostoevsky would have insisted, could never accept such a bargain.
That good must be pursued and evil avoided is obvious to them as a matter of moral logic and reinforced for them by the divine law.
St Paul says it would be sheer slander to say any Christian would think the end justifies the means.
Rather than a self-interested ideological or bureaucratic strategy for maximising some supposed greater good, or the pursuit of some fairy tale nirvana, the good life for human beings is doing good.
In 1973, the American writer Ursula Le Guin published a short work of philosophical fiction, The Ones Who Walk Away from the Omnilus.
Though limited in technology and resources, the citizens of this utopia are intelligent, cultured, and free of overlords and slaves, enemies, soldiers and priests.
The serenity and splendour require that a single unfortunate child be locked up in perpetual darkness, malnourished and miserable.
When the citizens discover this, most react with disgust at first, but then they acquiesce in this one injustice that secures the happiness of all the rest.
The few that are unwilling to accept the macabre terms of this happiness became the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Specifically, the unsophisticated pragmatism that says you can do a bit of evil for the sake of some good.
And the more erudite calculus of the utilitarians that justifies even great evils.
Le Guin was inspired to write her story after reading an essay by the philosopher William James, who posed a similar moral dilemma.
But there's another striking parallel to Ivan in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov.
who asks Alyosha whether one could build a world of happiness knowing its foundation relied upon the torture of an innocent child.
Christians, Dostoevsky would have insisted, could never accept such a bargain.
That good must be pursued and evil avoided is obvious to them as a matter of moral logic and reinforced for them by the divine law.
St Paul says it would be sheer slander to say any Christian would think the end justifies the means.
Rather than a self-interested ideological or bureaucratic strategy for maximising some supposed greater good, or the pursuit of some fairy tale nirvana, the good life for human beings is doing good.
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