"Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe

Matthew Knapton · 01 May 2011, 03:23 · from 2011-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: eruantien at gmail.com (Matthew Knapton)
Date: Sun, 1 May 2011 04:23:07 +0100
Subject: (urth) "Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe
In-Reply-To: <4DBCCACC.6050401 at io.com>
References: <4DBB1060.1020105 at gmail.com>
	<794632.94323.qm at web161803.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
	<BANLkTinVfFohh9fu7VwbgjSKKOfv2Bg-0Q at mail.gmail.com>
	<4DBB3F16.4000500 at gmail.com>
	<BANLkTikERbP9OsLJArNvPEp1PScccdP1SA at mail.gmail.com>
	<4DBC3F51.6070703 at io.com>
	<BANLkTik4f3+Pam8qjUpd0iViPKQqyJq4-Q at mail.gmail.com>
	<4DBC7A40.4090306 at io.com>
	<BANLkTinrXbXqxp9uQzr+Q8J_qustH5tUNw at mail.gmail.com>
	<4DBCCACC.6050401 at io.com>
Message-ID: <BANLkTimXeh5vXTJu9B_WXBVgXcU+5aQYQw at mail.gmail.com>

Well you're asking a mouthful there. It's certainly meaningful, at least -
what constitutes a morally wrong thing, whether such a thing can be
justified (and how, if so), etc, are all real issues in the field of ethics.
More particularly, Omelas seems like a utilitarian society; a criticism of
it is a criticism of its principles, and there has been plenty of criticism
and discussion of utilitarian ideas over the years.

Whether the story is useful is less easy to say, though even if it is you
can't really move from dismissing it to dismissing the large swathes of
ethics it happens to touch upon :)

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 3:51 AM, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:

> On 4/30/2011 9:29 PM, Matthew Knapton wrote:
>
>> Well, it's a comment that even when the 'gain' is as huge as it is in
>> Omelas, there's something wrong about the purposeful mistreatment and
>> deprivation of an innocent. Whether you like the story or not, that's
>> undeniably a moral statement, yes.
>>
>
> But is "there's something wrong about the purposeful mistreatment and
> deprivation of an innocent" a useful or meaningful moral statement? Is the
> wrongness greater or lesser if the mistreatment is without purpose, or if
> the purpose is unknown? Compare Jackson's "The Lottery," and the news items
> about the third-world villages poisoned by 1st world computer waste.
>
>
> --
> Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
> Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
> < http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20110501/c0188ca9/attachment-0001.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net