Justifying Joel’s Decisions

Justifying Joel’s Decisions

Written by Samuel Gronseth

Joel’s rampage at the end of The Last of Us leaves scores dead, including doctors central to the search for a cure, for Ellie’s sake. His actions save her life, but in doing so he effectively destroys any known chance of finding a cure for the infection that’s left the world in ruins. This act, and his decision to lie to her about it, leave the player asking themselves: did Joel do the right thing?

This question has endured long since The Last of Us released in 2013, and it persists after The Last of Us Part II intentionally refused to definitively answer it. As with many of the game’s central conflicts, the morality of the situation defies black-and-white moral judgments, and there’s value to be had in debating the ethics of Joel’s decision to kill the Fireflies and save Ellie.

That said.

Just because there’s value to be had in the discourse doesn’t mean most of the discussion that actually happens contains that value. As with so many issues within the gaming community, this question gets muddled, simplified, overthought, and all other manner of bent out of shape. So I’m not here to provide definitive answers, but I thought it would be worth going over the facts, as well as some of the common arguments, and set a few things straight.

On a basic level, this is the question being asked: is one person’s life worth saving all humanity? The Fireflies are trying to find a way to spread Ellie’s immunity to others. If this doesn’t result in a cure, it could at least result in some kind of preventative measure to keep the living from being infected. Obviously, this would be a good thing. But there’s no way to study Ellie’s immunity without killing her.

But of course, it’s also a little more complicated than that. As many people are quick to point out, this is not a guarantee of a cure. It’s a chance. There’s no guarantee that studying Ellie’s immunity would result in a usable cure, only that they could study her biology and use their findings to try and develop one. So this alters the core question, if only slightly; is one person’s life worth the chance to save all humanity?

But beyond that development, the rest is all rather subjective. There are a number of arguments based on both the game’s lore and the understanding of the characters.

If one wants to condemn Joel’s actions, it’s fairly easy: the answer to our core question is “yes.” Taking Ellie’s life for the good of all humanity is justified, if tragic, loss.. A reasonable chance to counteract a threat to the entire species is, by most ethical standards, worth the life of a single person. That doesn’t make it easy, or even necessarily “good,” but it’s a fairly easy answer and all one really needs to condemn what Joel did.

Alternatively, one of the most effective angles is the character-based approach. Whether Joel’s decision was wrong or not, it was relatable. The point, one could argue, is not whether he did right or wrong, but understanding why he did what he did. And this is very much true; The Last of Us is far more invested in its characters than its world or the moral questions they all face, and a full understanding of the story will focus far more on who these people are and why they did what they did than what was happening on a larger scale and whether it’s good or bad.

According to this interpretation, Joel acted emotionally, out of a personal need to protect Ellie. Whether he did it out of love for her or desperation to hold on to his surrogate daughter is a question worth asking, but somewhat aside the point for the purpose of this article. The point here is that we can sidestep the ethical question by making it less about “doing the right thing,” and more about flawed, emotional people making the decisions that seem right to them. Some people say they might have done the same thing in his situation, regardless of right or wrong, and that’s a legitimate reading.

But that’s not enough for some people, because to sidestep the question of Joel’s guilt inherently presumes some degree of wrongdoing, or at the very least, the possibility of it. Some would rather exonerate him entirely.

Most of these attempts focus on a single question: would a cure have been possible to begin with? At first glance this question seems impossible to answer; after all, the game itself intentionally leaves it unclear. But that doesn’t stop fans on the internet from speculating!

Some have pointed out that, technically, a vaccine isn’t capable of fighting a fungus, and that is legitimate as far as I (someone who earned a BA in English and hasn’t taken a biology class since 2012) am concerned. It’s also a pretty empty and bad faith approach to the game.

The word “vaccine” is indeed used in the game to refer to the cure. But “vaccine” is a generally understood word for injections that prevent the contraction of deadly conditions. Even if there’s a more medically accurate word, it would not only be better for the game to use a word the player is more likely to understand, it would make more sense for the characters to use this word as well. And yes, that even includes the doctors when talking to non-medical personnel. The goal is to determine how Ellie’s immunity could be granted to other people, and that isn’t changed by a technically inaccurate word choice.

This kind of nitpicky critique treats the game less like a story to be conveyed and more like a puzzle meant to be outsmarted. Even if this argument was in good faith, it bumps up against the simple fact that it’s exceedingly unlikely that the word “vaccine” was intentionally used to indicate that the doctors didn’t know medical science and couldn’t possibly do what they set out to do. It’s an intentional misreading of the story for the sake of proving a point, and those may help people feel smart, but they don’t help anyone understand the story.

Then there are questions about whether the Fireflies could have mass produced a cure, considering their limited resources. This is a legitimate question, but it presupposes two things: first, that humanity’s numbers are large and consolidated enough that the Fireflies would need a significant amount of doses to immunize people, and second, that the cure isn’t worth producing if it can’t save literally everyone.

The first falls apart pretty quickly. The game establishes how few people are still alive (it’s even called The Last of Us, it’s not subtle about this), and especially considering how spread out communities are, it’s reasonable to expect that “saving humanity” would play out practically as immunizing the few people near the Fireflies’ base and branching out, even if very slowly as the cure is produced. Even if they couldn’t mass produce the cure, they don’t actually have to make all that much of it to immunize the low numbers of people necessary.

And second, even if they can’t immunize everyone, does that make it not worth it? Even a small number of immune people would have increased survivability and be capable of repopulating humankind. I shouldn’t need to say this, but between this argument and the similarly common and weirdly nihilistic, “humanity is not worth saving,” it seems I must: saving some lives is better than saving no lives. An inability to save everyone on the planet is not a reason to give up on saving as many as possible.

When it comes down to it, all the attempts to ethically justify Joel’s actions by disproving the Fireflies’ ultimate goal of a cure don’t really measure up. They tend to be based on over-analytical nitpicks that value pedantry over narrative comprehension, and when they’re not, they just lead to moral quandaries with far more obvious answers than the one we started with. In the end, it still comes down to a chance to save humanity, and the loss of one human life to gain it.

Shifting away from the cure to Ellie, however, there is a more compelling ethical breach on the Fireflies’ part: Ellie is unconscious when they find her, and still unconscious when they plan to operate on her. The issue here isn’t just the uncertainty of a cure; it’s the fact that the one most affected by this has no opportunity to decide her own fate.

The Fireflies would have lost little, if anything, for waiting until Ellie woke up and asking her what she wanted them to do. Even a cursory reading of her character makes it clear that she would willingly give her life for the hope of a cure (even before this was confirmed in the sequel), and the core ethical question here would be significantly simplified by pinning “with her consent” onto the end.

Which, I expect, is why Naughty Dog didn’t write it that way. There are a number of reasons the Fireflies might have intentionally done the operation without waiting to consult Ellie about it (most likely concern that she might refuse), but I’m not convinced any of them overcome the simple fact that, if they had, Joel’s actions would be far more unambiguously wrong, and the game’s famous gutpunch of an open ending would have been impossible.

But even if there are some writing contrivances at play, it doesn’t change what happens in the game, and the questions that arise from it. As it stands, the Fireflies were planning to kill Ellie in hopes of finding a cure, and they were planning to do it without her input. Joel’s actions could be interpreted as not only saving Ellie from death, but more specifically from a death she hadn’t had the chance to explicitly choose.

At this point, there’s something of an established theme; the vast majority of the arguments formed from scouring the game’s optional content and worldbuilding details are in defense of Joel’s decision. Theoretically, there should be a number of arguments that could be made for both sides, but instead we get a ton of effort put into defending Joel and only a few key arguments for the reverse. Why is that?

Well, there’s a fairly simple explanation for that: The Last of Us is an interactive story, and one of the most basic elements of video game storytelling is that the player will, inherently, relate to the protagonist on some level. Joel’s decisions are his own, but the player acts them out, and as such, the player wants to believe the things they do in the game are good.

I’m sure we’ve all done something wrong in our lives and spent entirely too much time afterward trying to justify why, actually, it wasn’t really that bad. Maybe we did it for a good reason, or maybe the stigma against it is what’s wrong, or maybe we block out the negative consequences to shield ourselves from guilt. It’s only human. And while The Last of Us has no interest in saddling us with the guilt of Joel’s decisions, our control over the character does have an unsettling effect. He may have been the one to do it in the story, but we’re the ones who pulled the metaphorical (and literal) trigger. That makes a lot of players uncomfortable. It’s only natural they would seek to justify it in hindsight.

I genuinely think that, if the upcoming HBO adaptation of The Last of Us faithfully and successfully adapts the story of the first game, most first-time watchers will feel far more negatively about Joel’s decision than most players do. Separated from that need to justify what we perceive as our own actions, the emotional stakes we have in the situation are significantly lower, and I expect that will make a big difference in how people see the ending.

But time will tell. I’m fully aware that characterizing a large swath of the gaming community as making unsound ethical judgments to salve their guilt is a bit presumptuous, but I think players and critics alike often underestimate the subtle power of interactivity in non-linear stories. Even while The Last of Us plays with perspective to create a dissonance between Joel and the player, the bond between player and protagonist is a powerful one that often goes overlooked.

At the very least, it’s definitely powerful enough to drive players to justify what they perceive as their own actions when Joel’s decisions require them to drive a knife into a doctor’s throat.

SAMUEL GRONSETH is the creator, writer, and host of the popular YouTube channel, “Games as Lit. 101.” https://www.youtube.com/user/gamesasliterature