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Is the original a critique of utilitarianism as an ethical framework?

• defrost 3y ago
  The "original" is Ursula K. Le Guin's spin on a passage from William James: 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 sceptical 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? who spun that from a piece by Dostoyevsky who described the dilemma he posed as referring to the doctrine of salvation through the crucifixion of Jesus. Whether the short story by Le Guin, the extract from James, the dilemma as it appears in Brothers Karamazov, the sacrifice of Jesus on a cross, or any other variation told on the happiness of many at the cost of the suffering of one is a critique of anything as anything should be a matter of personal judgement.