If one innocent person is tortured so that everyone else can live and the world doesn't end, is that simultaneously unfair but also morally preferable over complete destruction of everything?
Basically the plot of this story. It poses the issue of how much we value society over the individual, and if that is good or not. Would you want to live in a world that depended on the the torture of a single person. You then could extrapolate that out to societies in the real world, US and chattel slavery. the west and the use of sweat shop labor for cheap products, the Emirates and their use of migrants as indentured servants. Even tipped wages for servers in the USA, the gig economy, and things like medical residencies could be considered a minor version of Omelas. As humans, we often tolerate the abuse or exploitation of others for our own benefit, or even just out of ignorance and inaction.
Random people we've never heard of get tortured every day for less. What's one more? Jack Bauer will do whatever he needs to do so everyone else can live and the world doesn't end.
That is many people's mentality, yes. It probably depends if you were the one being tortured or were close. Pain can be ignored if not directly felt, especially if it means whatever you think your survival entails.
I'm not comfortable with it, but I'm not comfortable with life either.
In practice we all know what we would do. Given that morality is at best invented and aspirational that is the moral action. Or at least we think that it is.
I think it's a harder problem when you're the one that has to do the torturing. It's easier to say "yeah that dude should get tortured" than to do the waterboarding yourself. Unless you're fucked in the head of course.
It's a mis framing of the problem. In your exploration of hypothetical morality, the entity creating this scenario where the world is at stake unless someone is tortured is the one with moral responsibility for the outcome