In her brief and rather notorious story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula K. Le Guin describes a beautiful, flourishing city that depends for its wealth and stability on the torture of a child. Everyone who lives in Omelas understands this cost, and some, unable to accept it, leave.

“Omelas” is a useful fable for understanding the ambient feeling of complicity we all have from time to time when we look out at the bewildering array of systems that (if we’re lucky) bring us convenience and prosperity but often bring others misery. Indeed, it’s not hard for me to rattle off a list of things that make my life slightly easier that make the lives of others substantially worse, right down to the computer I’m typing on. I remember that around 2010, when I read about the suicides taking place at factories making iPhones, I resolved that adopting new technologies probably wasn’t worth the moral cost. But by 2012 I owned an iPhone and a few years later a MacBook Air—because it was inconvenient not to. So much for my high-mindedness.