Couple of comments.
Example 1.
The story (“The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas”) tells of a city called Omelas—a city of happiness and civic celebration, a place without kings or slaves, without advertisements or a stock exchange, a place without the atomic bomb
For someone who does not particularly value the absence of those things in and of themselves, there isn't much of a dilemma, but I see where you are going.
You are attempting to set up a scenario using absolutes. Absolute happiness for the many versus absolute misery for the individual.
This is useful for establishing a logical framework for further debate. Argumentam ad absurdum.
Let's try to see what happens if we change some variables in the equation.
What if we slightly inconvenience the individual in order to slightly better the lives of the many?
Or what if we moderately inconvenience a third of the population in order to moderately improve the lives of the remainnig two thirds?
In real life this could equate to whether we should impose extra taxes on the top X% in order to pay for extra welfare for the bottom Y%, no?
Or if we should kill the single whistleblower to maintain national security.
Or for establishing acceptable loss ratios for collateral damage when bombing a Taliban position in the middle of a village.
Moral Dilemma #2.
You're driving a train. Suddenly you have no brakes. Up ahead you see 5 workman on the tracks. The Whistle doesn't work. The only thing you can do is steer slightly. As you look, you can also see a side track which you could steer onto, but there is a person on that track as well. You have a decision that you must make now. Do you veer off to the side track knowing that you'll kill one person instead of 5? Or do you stay the course and kill the 5 workmen, saving the one?
Depends who the 6 people are.
If the one person on the sidetrack was my child, I would kill the 5 without hesitating, then take a whizz on their remains just to demonstrate that I found the implied dilemma insulting.
If it was my elderly aunt who has terminal cancer and two weeks left to live, I would probably hesistate a bit then run her down, and then cry a bit over life's unfairness and the fact that my consins were about to kick my ass sometime in the immediate future.
It is the same dilemma; the good of the many versus the few. But again, as soon as you introduce relevant circumstance, the scenario changes.
Personal preference as well as personal impact plays a role for the person making the decision.
Going back to example #1.
A libertarian would probably release the child and let the chips fall where they may, whereas a social democrat would keep it imprisoned. But what if it was your own child? Or not a child at all, but Hitler instead?
Or example #3.
Would you torture the guilty to avoid a nuclear terror attack? His family? A random person? Your neighbour?
Or would you torture them just a teensy tiny little bit (aka waterboarding)? Or withhold chocolate rations?
Or what if it wasn't a question of nuclear weapons, but of a regular old suicide bomb that would "merely" kill 20 people? Or cause the Coca Cola company to suffer a quarterly deficit?
Moral imperatives tend to become a bit fuzzy when you remove the absolutes, and tend to devolve into utilitarianism. But utilitariansim is individual.
My thought is that your exercise is useful for getting to know oneself better, but as regards the application of concrete principles in real life, it is a bit less relevant.
