The people who decide to stay in Omelas are able, eventually, to accept the "terrible justice of reality": that their own happiness and the happiness of thousands of others depends upon the abject misery of this one child. The ones who stay dry their tears and begin to justify the choice to themselves, believing that "even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom." They convince themselves that the child has lived in fear for too long to actually enjoy freedom and that it has lived for too long in darkness to enjoy sunshine. They also believe that it is too "imbecile" to respond to kindness, and that it would be too "wretched" without the walls to which it has become accustomed.

The people who stay in Omelas find a way to accept that the price of their joy is the child's degradation, and they, perhaps, also believe that their knowledge of the child's misery actually makes them more "compassion[ate]" and "gentle." They feel that the "nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science," are absolutely dependent on that one child's pain, and so they can find a way to go on knowing that it is there. They think that the lovely young boy who plays the flute so beautifully could not do so unless that other child also existed. In the end, the ones who stay must decide that the price of one child's life and happiness and freedom is worth the happiness and freedom of everyone else.