A perfect city's happiness depends on one child's permanent suffering. Would you stay?

In Ursula K. Le Guin's 1973 story, the city of Omelas is utterly happy and just, except that its prosperity magically requires one child to be kept in filth and misery forever. Most citizens eventually learn of the child, feel horror, and then choose to stay anyway. The story is used across philosophy courses to test whether total happiness can ever justify one person's permanent, necessary suffering.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas — New Dimensions 3 anthology, 1973