Contra Black on The Last of Us

Full spoilers for The Last of Us after the break.

Recently, Hamish Black released a video discussing the ending of The Last of Us:

Coincidentally, I had just replayed TLoU to get the trophy for finishing the game on Survivor+ difficulty, and my opinion of the ending is strikingly different from Black's. I find myself in much closer accord with Joseph Anderson's conclusion:

[Full disclosure: I support both Black and Anderson on Patreon.]

Briefly, TLoU ends in a hospital where the protagonist, Joel, wakes up and is informed by Marlene, the leader of a militia group called the Fireflies, that Ellie, Joel's surrogate daughter and the only known example of a person who is immune to the zombie plague, is scheduled to have her brain dissected because the Fireflies believe they can use it to create a vaccine. Joel responds by killing every Firefly between himself and Ellie, rescuing her from the operating table, finishing off Marlene, and lying to Ellie about what happened. (The last bit is the main focus of Black's video.) Black describes these actions as:

For sure, Joel not only doomed humanity by destroying any chance of a vaccine, but did so in a particularly ferocious way. You don't need me to tell you how bad this is.

Don't get me wrong, Joel did a really, truly monstrous thing. Well, several monstrous things, actually, and I'm not here to tell you that he's somehow the good guy.

I'm here to tell you that he's somehow the good guy.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

I think it's actually quite interesting that the moral intuitions of Black and myself are so diametrically opposed. First off, it's likely that we fundamentally disagree on the facts of what happened. I'm not certain, but it seems to me that in Black's version of events, Ellie woke up after her near-drowning, Marlene explained what the Fireflies were planning to do, and Ellie volunteered to sacrifice herself:

That slightly confused look in Ellie's eyes when she wakes up in the back of the car, shocked that she even opened them again to begin with.

She knew. She goddamn knew she was sacrificing her life for what she saw to be the greater good. 

Unfortunately for Black's argument, there is absolutely no evidence that this happened. The player never sees Ellie after Joel gets knocked out by a Firefly guard and before Joel enters the operating room. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but I can do one better. When Joel confronts Marlene, she says "It's what she'd want." Marlene is arguing to Joel that Ellie would volunteer as a sacrifice, not that she has done so. The Fireflies anesthetized Ellie as soon as they got their hands on her and had no intention of ever asking for her consent.

The Three-Legged Stool

Black declares Joel's actions immoral according to the philosophies of consequentialism (Joel was wrong because the consequences of his actions was "destroying any chance of a vaccine.") and virtue ethics (Joel was wrong because he committed the vice of "ferocity."), but he strangely ignores the third branch of moral philosophy, deontology. Deontology is the belief that moral behavior consists of following rules. The operative rule here is "Thou shalt not kill." For a deontologist, there are absolutely no shades of gray here. The Fireflies are trying to kill a child without the consent of either her or her guardian. This is murder. Almost all deontologists agree that it is morally acceptable to kill someone if that is the only way to prevent them from committing murder, and this is exactly what Joel does. A deontologist doesn't care at all how murder actually contributes to "the greater good," murder is murder and murderers deserve punishment. Dozens of homicides in defense of an innocent third party are acceptable; one murder is not.

Of course, there's no objective basis for interpreting Joel's actions as "ferocious." I prefer the lens of "righteous fury" myself. I was immensely satisfied by the game's "final boss." In the operating room, three graduates of the Josef Mengele School of Medicine try to stop you from saving Ellie. One of them is so dedicated to the cause of murdering an unconscious teenage girl that he threatens you with his scalpel. There's a button prompt to kill him with his own blade, but I prefer to use the flamethrower.

Would-be child murderer in life, extra crispy in death.

However, even from a utilitarian perspective, saving Ellie is still the correct choice. The Fireflies say they need to dissect her brain to make a vaccine, but...

The Fireflies are morons.

Anderson really hammers this point home in his video. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the Fireflies are capable of making a vaccine. It's overwhelmingly likely that killing Ellie would accomplish absolutely nothing. This applies even if we don't cheat with the argument that curing the zombie plague is a priori impossible thanks to the conventions of the zombie apocalypse genre.

Let's look at the three major human population centers shown in the game:

Boston: The Fireflies lose.

The Firefly situation in Boston is one of total military defeat. The only thing we see them accomplish is a single checkpoint bombing, which accomplishes absolutely nothing. The Fireflies are on the run, their leader is wounded and alone, and their best option for escorting Ellie is a random pair of smugglers. They have also failed to enlist any appreciable fraction of the population in their fight against the supposedly tyrannical military government. (What we actually see of the military shows that they do a pretty good job caring for orphans, if nothing else.) I would expect the average Bostonian's quality of life to improve significantly after the Fireflies are routed.

The Fireflies are morons.

Pittsburgh: The Fireflies win.

The Fireflies in Pittsburgh actually succeeded in driving out the military. They subsequently abandoned the city, which is now a nightmarish hellhole populated by psychotic hunters who kill anyone they see, preferably with a .50-caliber machine gun on a Humvee. Boston appears to be preferable in literally every way.

The Fireflies are morons.

Jackson: The Fireflies aren't involved at all.

Jackson is the closest this game has to a utopia. We never see it up close, but it's described as self-sufficient, with enough electricity to use on things like screening movies for children. It's led by a woman named Maria and her husband Tommy, an ex-Firefly. I think it's notable that no one ever mentions anything Tommy accomplished while he was a Firefly. Jackson is entirely a project of his post-Firefly life.

The Fireflies are morons.

Firefly Tactics and Strategy

The Fireflies have built nothing and have lost all of their territory except for a single hospital. To drive the point home, the Fireflies were very numerous. Joel and Ellie find dead Fireflies everywhere (identifiable by their dog tags). Apparently every danger in post-apocalyptic America is more than a match for a Firefly.

The Fireflies are morons.

The Fireflies couldn't research their way out of an empty room.

Joel and Ellie encounter a Firefly "researcher" in the university. He's sitting in a chair with a bullet in his brain. An audio log records how the idiot managed to get himself bitten by one of his own infected monkey test subjects. This was the guy the Fireflies assigned to their vaccine research program. His replacement is presumably less qualified than he was.

The situation in Salt Lake City is no better. The Fireflies have had Ellie in their possession for hours at most, and they are already committed to killing her. Would someone Ellie bites develop the same immunity that she possesses? What about a blood transfusion? Might Ellie's children inherit her immunity? The Fireflies don't know the answers to any of these questions, and they don't care. Murdering a child was Plan A. This isn't a research program, it's a cult. Feel free to correct me, but I'm not aware of any revolutionary vaccines being developed by cults.

The Fireflies are morons.

In Conclusion

The Last of Us makes a compelling case against consequentialism.

1. Marlene believes that the ends justify the means.
2. However, she's a moron and is incapable of accurately predicting the ends.
3. Being a moron, she fails to realize that she is a moron.
4. Cue pointless murder.

The lesson here is that this could be you. How do you know that you're not a moron? Operating in a consequentialist framework with no guardrails like the aforementioned "thou shalt not kill" is incredibly hazardous. There's no protection from devolving into a cargo cult version of consequentialism that permits you to commit any atrocity you please as long as you say the magic words "greater good." Marlene's going to make a vaccine, and she's not going to let little things like "basic scientific competence" or "medical ethics" stand in her way. Vaccines: Just Add Murder!

On a personal note, no character archetype makes me see red quite like the Evil Idiot. I was disappointed that I couldn't feed Mikul from The Witcher his own entrails, but I hope The Last of Us 2 includes an option to piss on Marlene's grave.