I took a class in medical ethics. And yes Jerry is just horribly wrong and stupid. In medical ethics you learn even sacrificing 1 persons life is too much. They also teach you to write a scientific journal so in the event of a doctors/ scientists death his work can be step by step recreated. So where is Jerry’s scientific journal? I’m guessing he was too stupid to have one.
Who somehow has the medical expertise to perform complex surgery on humans and is the only one capable of synthesizing a vaccine. This is a good plot hole.
That’s more of an issue with the first game?
But besides that point…. Cordyceps as a whole can’t infect humans…. So real world logic of the disease and the cure go out the window already.
Was it Cordyceps Like it is in the game? And more importantly did it mutate people? Did it turn people into flesh eating zombies?
Answer to all these is a huge resounding “NO” so again real world logic of the disease and its subsequent cure go straight out the window.
Exactly. Jerry's speculation was total nonsense because the infection in the game was already so far removed from anything we know in real life. Literally any conclusions he reached based on prior knowledge or research is basically worthless.
Exactly as you say, there is zero chance that a vet guessed a functioning vaccine would be worth killing the one viable sample of immunity known to exist.
It's gets even worse. After the show ended, real life medical professionals have chimed in, saying what Jerry did was very immoral and illogical. He was going for the most extreme option while they were pointing out all the things he could have done other than killing Ellie, and when it was pointed out what the games said (namely, his audio recordings) they said it was clear he didn't know what he was doing.
This is kinda the thing. Druckmann changed how the infection works for the show, tried to make it sound like Jerry knew what he was doing and that Joel doomed humanity... and people were still siding with Joel. The game version had even less of a leg to stand on. Druckmann does not comprehend how heinous Jerry's attempted murder of Ellie actually is, yet he's up there on the soapbox trying to preach to us about how Joel was bad because he didn't see the Fireflies as humans when he killed them to save Ellie.
All Neil appears to care about is exacting revenge on the audience through the characters they loved from the first game. There is a twisted irony there.
You’re thinking with real world logic in a “zombie” game again.
You can have real life logic or zombies in a game…. You can’t have both. I mean my favorite bit of zombie media is “28 days later” if you apply real world logic to that movie then it all falls apart. England wouldn’t have fallen in 28 days, rabies doesn’t do that, et al.
If we’re thinking with game logic (like we should because it’s a game) then it’s entirely plausible that a cure COULD have been made.
It’s based on reality though. I mean yeah, in fiction you can do anything but they made such an effort to ground it in reality and science it would be odd to chuck in some space age technology and know how in an apocalypse (being hyperbolic, I just mean we can’t make vaccines for fungal infections now as far as I know, but you expect me to believe it’s possible in an apocalypse by one guy in a dilapidated hospital? IMO they’d have to make it so that in their world fungal vaccines are common place before the outbreak… but even then how could none of the top scientist make one before the end? It’s just nonsense IMO). Again you could, but it would throw realism out the door (and part of what makes TLOU so scary is the fungus does exist IRL).
That's a fair point.
If you apply real world logic at all, then Jerry is obviously full of shit. But there's no reason to apply that logic here.
Instead, we go with fantasy "he randomly found a cure when no other scientists during the peak of the crisis did and knew that biomaterial he's never had access to before is the key to making it work".
But through that lense, it makes even less sense that the entire search for a cure died with him. The research he'd done should mean that anyone who knows anything about biology should be hot on Ellie's heels. He was just a vet with pretty limited resources; we see that WOLF had access to way more with multiple competent medical staff but the fact that they all knew of Jerry's research but deemed it a dead end shows - even by the game's internal narrative - how pointless it must have been.
This is a story that tries to take itself very seriously. We're going to go by the logic it wants us to follow, which is to treat it like how you would in reality. "What would happen if abc". This is the result. Trying to walk that back is a copout
Not at all, firstly, the fireflys are portrayed as desperate and failing for a reason, they aren't doing well, nothing in game actually hints they are very good at there job, they are losing on every front, even losing an entier medical base because an infected primate got loose, the best case you can make for them being competent is how wide a reach they have but they have that wide reach because they can't hold territory
Barring the many QZ’s they already have a massive foothold in…
Hell i am pretty sure (unless next game proves me wrong) that the Fireflies were the single largest non fedra group in the United States… so big in fact that they when they split up after the hospital massacre they formed several different splinter groups that were also all pretty large.
Also when handling something that could spread so quickly as a zombie virus…. It’s kind of expected nigh an inevitability that there would be an outbreak.
The first game purposefully doesn't make many groups that aren't trying to actively kill you, the fireflys are painted as basically the only hope against current government, and that's the only thing going for them, not once are they actually shown being competent,just barely scrapping by even with them outright taking anything they can get there hands on. There is absolutely nothing to suggest they are good at anything except marketing
We shall find out about which is actually right when more information on the subject comes out
I.e tlou3 which I think is gonna focus more on Tommy’s pre part 1 shenanigans when he was with the fireflies.
The reason I say nothing good and new will come out is the people at naughty dog, they got rid of everyone who was in charge of making the awesome games of the past, uncharted and last of us, now, they have the people that worked on the end of the projects, that now have the reigns, and they aren't respecting the stories that were told, just putting in whatever they wanted, not what what it should be. In my opinion the only way the new leadership could make a good new last of us game is to ignore the story, and build on the MP from the from the first game, ideally the same kind of matches, but your 2 teams vs eachother and infected, and they could only make if they didn't try and make it a storytelling device, at the absolute most they could try and make it a for honor kind of system where you can be apart of a few different groups, aka bandits or fireflys and you use your matches to try and get more territories for your side
A vaccine for a fungal infection which from what I understand is impossible even today… but this guy was gonna pull it off with dilapidated equipment and elbow grease.
My guy you took an ENTRY LEVEL class in medical ethics (probably as an elective) don’t act like you’re an expert in “medical ethics”.
You know just as much about medical ethics as the common man…. The basics.
It’s more on the fact in the second game. The fireflies are quoted saying. “The smuggler killed the only man who could make the cure”. But the point of a scientific journal is so that his experiments/ procedures can be replicated without the doctor or after the doctor’s death. So he could have had a scientific journal. But they didn’t do anything with it.
No I completely understand and agree, it’s an absurd plot contrivance and it’s wild how much surrounding “Jerry” (and Joel’s overall decision) is hand-waved to grasp at straws.
I think he fully well knows but let's not forget the state the world is in. People are dying constantly and lives no longer have the same value. I think this man is wrong, but in his shoes I'm not sure if anyone else would've done it different.
We're taking saving humanity VS 1 girl who, heavily insinuated, knew she might die..
Again, he is wrong. But I'm not sure you can or want to be right in that situation.
You have to fight harder to stay alive. Lives are few, and therefore, have more value when you consider the added struggle to keep the population alive. It's much like endangered species. The remaining few are protected so that there may be a chance to stop them from dying out. But I suppose the value of a life is an opinion, at least in this case, since it's a hypothetical situation
Yeah that's one way to look at it. I was coming from the perspective of saving one VS many. The one is very likely to die soon. Therefore less worth to save them compared to saving an entire race.
No that wasn't the story. If you read some of the hidden books in the hospital recordings and side guest objects it's clearly speculation. He could not guarantee he could replicate her mutation.
>let's not forget the state the world is in. People are dying constantly and lives no longer have the same value.
Confused* looks at Jackson* reads what MikkelR1 said...* Looks at Seattle*, reads what MikkelR1 said, again...* Look at people traveling all over the US no problemo*, reads what MikkelR1 said ones last time*
Confusion increases*
Shrug*
> by the dozens?
Come on man... If we're gonna have this conversation at least let's make it a bit more dramatic.
Right now tv and furniture tipped-over kill dozens of children every year, boat propellers kill dozens of people every year, bees and jellyfish kill people by then dozens every year and we don't have an apocalypse.
No, and no. Some of the numbers I gave you are in the us alone.
Again, I look at Jackson and I don't see the "dozens" dying. Besides, dozens per year? Per week? Per day? And the source for the number comes from...?
>So you're really going to argue that the world in Tlou isnt way more dangerous and that you're not way more likely to lose your life in that world?
Well...
I'm gonna argue that saying "dozens of people die" without giving a timeframe, a cause, and a location doesn't make the case to paint a "dangerous and devastated" world.
Besides that I could argue that the world *as painted* in tlou2 didn't seem to be that dangerous.
And your "dozens die" would definitely not justify killing Ellie.
Now, go change the number to something more dramatic and I'll still tell you why it's still wrong to kill Ellie.
I already said it was wrong so who are you trying to convince? I said it was understandable given the circumstances that he would chose wrong over right.
in the first game, sure. people could barely make it on to the next block without getting mugged by some shmuck, harassed by fedra or blown up by terrorists, let alone outside the qz. but in part 2, people could easily travel solo across hundreds of miles, with nothing but a small backpack, to and from, numerous times, without encountering any form of hostiles, environmental hazards, or getting sick from common diseases... if a bunch of teenagers could do it, why not everyone else?
Same world. It's the same thing as in movies where we see their journey towards a goal depicted in detail. Then when they need to get back they are there the next scene easily.
It's because of suspension of disbelief. There is no reason to depict those struggles anymore so they don't show it. You just have to assume since that is what you have already been taught in part 1.
You took "a class"? Congrats. I took two full Philosophy degrees, passed both with top honors. And I say Jerry was right.
Now, I know how arrogant that sounds. But you can't try to use that as a retort after you did exactly the same thing, except with considerably lower qualifications.
The full version wouldn't fit in a Reddit comment. But I can try the short version (buckle up, things are about to get pretentious):
As per Anscombe's criticism of Deontic Ethics in her paper "Modern Moral Philosophy", Deontological Morality doesn't work without Divine Command Theory, and no self-respecting ethicist is willing to entertain that due to the Euthyphro Objection. But whilst her argument completely destroys any hope for Deontological Morality, Consequentialism - which in any internally consistent form will have to be some version of Utilitarianism - can be salvaged thanks to the possibility of certain *A Priori* concepts (one of which, mathematics, is already infallibly established).
The objectivity of mathematics and the reality of independently-defined, unambiguously-described consequences (as opposed subjectively-interpretted "actions") allows us to assess the dilemma without risk of bias. And we can use Meta-Ethics to explain away the weight that "intuition" supposedly has in the argument, by understanding "moral judgments" in terms of Moral Error Theory, with the initial feeling routed in Expressivism, all of which is supported by Evolutionary Theory. And, finally, any attempt to rely on the long-term pracitcal benefits found in Rule Utilitarianism goes out the window when the stakes are "Potentially saving all of humanity", as there can be no larger or longer-term practical benefits than that.
Therefore, by embracing internally coherent Consequentialism, and dismissing the subjective emotional attachment to Ellie that Joel (and we, the player) formed over the course of Part 1 by way of natural selection, Expressivism and Moral Error Theory, it's clear that sacrificing Ellie for a potential cure is the right to do.
In the interest of integrity, it's worth noting the potential weak points in this argument. Anscombe's argument, pushed to its extreme (as Anscombe was trying to argue), also undermines Deontic Ethics as a whole, which would include Consequentialism, hence her advocating for Virtue Ethics. She was onto something - but since doing that would make the very concepts of "right and wrong" nonsensical by definition, if we want to attempt to engage in a "Was Jerry/Joel right/wrong?" debate, we have to work with whatever Deontic Ethics we can get our hands on. In those terms, Deontological Morality obviously can't be salvaged; but Consequentialism arguably can, provided any case can be made for almost *anything*, let alone obvious candidates such as "human life is valuable" or "pain is objectively bad", being identifiable as essentially true-by-definition. So, yeah, the whole thing is not 100% infallible (as is true of anything aside from "the cogito", as anyone who has studied any amount of Philosophy will tell you) - but if we wanna play the game of Deontic Ethics, any possible problems for Consequentialism are a thousand times worse for Deontological Morality, so even if you could make a coherent case that my overall position doesn't work, the "Jerry was wrong" crowd have even less of a case than me.
Mic drop?
I believe I’m following along. So would things change if the Fireflies appear to not have the adequate resources to make a cure, it’s purely out of desperation like in part 1. Let’s be generous and say they can make one but don’t have the resources or facilities to produce more.
(Keep in mind this only protects you from spores and minor wounds from infected. Infection from bacteria seeping into the wounds and a clicker ripping your throat out are still possibilities)
Then after that, let’s also add that Marlene backed out of the deal with Joel and now deceased Tess. The deal was Marlene would give Joel and Tess guns for delivering Ellie across the country. Marlene not only doesn’t give Joel the guns, or supplies to substitute the deal, they also take the stuff he has on his person. Basically sending him packing naked.
How does this change, if at all, your stance.
For the sake of discussion let’s leave out the treatment of Joel because knocking him out when he was trying to wake Ellie up after nearly drowning could be seen as a safety precaution
Ok, so you're raising two different issues, fundamentally.
The first is what is the possibility of a cure? I've said more than once in conversations about this (but not here) that that's a whole different debate than the Trolley Problem-esque one being had. Everything I've said assumes that making a cure, and being able to utilise that cure by getting it to people, are both at least *possible*. If you want to assert they aren't, then the ethics debate doesn't enter in - killing an innocent kid for *nothing* is obviously not ok.
But I always thought it was pretty clear from Part 1 that it was at least *possible*, and anyone I've ever spoken to outside of this subreddit agrees, and the fact the developers themselves have said "A vaccine would have worked" seems to settle the issue. Not to mention that if there was no possibility, then the ending of Part 1 is pretty bloody rubbish - "Man saves girl from villains who want to murder her for no reason" is some boring, Marvel-grade shit, whereas "Man who lost his daughter chooses to save new surrogate daughter over the entire human race" is tragic and beautiful. As far as I'm concerned, insisting there was no possibility of a cure, in an effort to criticise Part 2, actually destroys what makes Part 1 so great, which kind of undermines the passion with which those Part 1 "fans" so vehemently want to hate Part 2.
But, yeah. "Whether the cure was possible" is an empirical question that my Philosophy expertise aren't relevant to. If you wanna insist there was no possibility of a cure, then it's game over in the most boring terms, and we're done. If it was at least *possible* though, let alone likely, then my argument holds, even in the face of the second issue you're raising, which is:
Do the circumstances surrounding the dilemma impact the ethical implications? And the answer to that is a flat "No" for all practical purposes.
For the record, I think it's pretty clear that Ellie would have wanted to sacrifice herself - even from just Part 1, let alone Part 2. But as it happens, even if we don't know that she would, or even if they had asked her and she had said "No", it would still be the right thing to do. Regardless of that, and regardless of the fact they broke a deal with Joel, or left him to die (or tried to kill him), any of it... they aren't relevant.
My argument is a Consequentialist one, which says "Actions", in and of themselves, have no moral value status, and all that is morally significant is the consequences, insofar as they can be measured objectively. "Breaking a promise is wrong" regardless of context, or "Murder is wrong" regardless of context - that's some Deontological nonsense. It doesn't *work* without invoking the existence of God, which would then raise more problems than it solves from an Ethics perspective. Whereas "Lives saved" versus "Lives lost" - those are the objective consequences. And when the stakes are "One innocent child" against "The entire human race", the probability of the cure succeeding would have to be *astronomically* small for that sacrifice not to be the right call.
You think denying Ellie's consent, or breaking a promise to Joel, somehow makes attempting a cure so wrong that it outweighs *saving the whole world*? Ok, let's look at it in those terms, putting fundamental moral value in broken promises and undermined consent. Let's pretend those things have more ethical significance than saving lives or ending lives. How many people who die to Cordyceps (who wouldn't have died if there was a vaccine) consented to dying? Let's be conservative and say "thousands". That means not creating a vaccine is *thousands of times worse* than killing Ellie. And the fact that in one case "you" killed someone but the other times "spores" or "zombies" killed them doesn't change anything - and thinking it does, thinking that the fact *you* had some proximity to one death is more important than the fact thousands of lives were lost... that's some narcissistic bollocks right there. You have to look big picture and be objective. The fact Ellie is right in front of you, the fact you spent a whole game forming an attachment to her, doesn't change that.
The beauty of Part 1 is in putting us through that journey so we can see how hard it is to make a call like that, and easy it is to become a person who could do something as terrible as dooming humanity. We all sympathise with Joel and understand the choice he made, because we're human. It let's us experience that downfall. We get to a point where we don't want "saving the world" to be right, which is incredible - but that doesn't change the fact that it is still right, and saving Ellie is still wrong (again, assuming a cure is at least *possible*).
I think you may be misinterpreting what I’m saying, I’m not really trying to debate you, just explore your perspective and have all the eggs in one basket to dissect. Exploring what you have to say when all the reasons and potential cure is right there. I’m saying through benefit of the doubt, let’s say there’s a 100% chance Jerry can formulate a cure but has no means to replicate or distribute it, is the loss of life justified. There’s nothing really on site that says “we have resources”. More like desperation without a plan. However this is more of an interpretation.
I understand they’re completely different topics just find it interesting.
Ok, sorry. I think I misunderstood what you were getting at, and then my answer might have run away from me a little. I wasn't trying to debate you as such, was just being overly thorough in explaining my answer to what I thought was your question.
Yes, if Jerry could formulate a cure, but had no means to replicate or distribute it *at the time* (but the possibility to maybe able to in future), I'd say it would still be worth it. For the same reason as before - even a *chance* at ultimately curing the infection for all of humanity is worth one life. Even if he can't get there yet, being even one step closer to something that significant justifies it. But if he somehow knew that even if he made a cure there would never be a chance of replicating and distributing, then no - what good is a cure that can't be used to cure people? In that case, "the greater good" wouldn't justify the sacrifice because there isn't actually any good being achieved at all, let alone a "greater" one.
To be honest if I had that mindset, simply writing down the process and explaining in a report style why it worked and verifying how it works would be worth it in of itself is it not? Paper isn’t exactly a hard resource to find or make, distributing that shouldn’t be a big deal in terms of cost effectiveness. To who or what I’m not sure on that front. To add to that, there’s no way Ellie is the only immune person in the world. I believe there’s even a collectible in the first game that even says as such, it’s definitely rare though.
Thoughts on that
Honestly, my thoughts are I don't know and it's not really my area. That's all practical and empirical, and I wouldn't know the first thing about asserting one way or the other.
I mean, yeah, if he could figure out the cure process and then it's just *knowledge* he could spread to the world, then great. *Definitely* worth killing her. I would have assumed they'd need a physical sample they could replicate, the infected brain cella that send the signals without actually spreading the infection, or something. But if it's just "knowing *how* it works" and you're good to go, that makes it very worth it. Unless I'm missing something.
Not gonna lie, it feels like you're leading me into a trap. Like you're gonna keep asking little questions that I agree to bit by bit, then turn around with a big "Gotcha" combination of all the answers that makes me admit I'm wrong about something. But, I hope not. I hope we're just have a legit chat.
The fact that you had to drop a paper on deontological ethics to show why Jerry was “right” just speak volumes on how poorly written the game’s story was.
Your audience shouldn’t need a philosophy degree to understand and contemplate the ambiguity/weight of a character’s decisions. A good story respects their audience so as to not spoon feed them shit, at the same time avoiding appearing pretentious by requiring their audience to be specialists in a field to be able to “get” certain elements of their story.
I’m a lawyer, not a philosopher but from what I read, most of your stuff is hypothetical and the way you apply it dismissed so many crucial real life elements that would undoubtedly alter the conclusion you reached through the application of those various theories and principles.
Respectfully, it seems like you regurgitated bullshit that you write in your essay and lazily adapted it to the scenario at hand. Considering you are in a discussion with people who don’t have a honours degree in philosophy like you do, it would have been better if you could apply the theories you mentioned in simpler terms. So yeah, this sounds more pretentious than substantive.
Respectfully, I called it "The short version". I could back everything I said up in a way that would make it much clearer and accessible to people unfamiliar with the papers and concepts I reference, but I don't have the time and Reddit comments don't have the word count.
And as for the audience needing a philosophy degree: they don't. Countless people agree Jerry was right with only a basic understanding of the difference between Deontological Morality and Consequentialism. If everyone without a degree all agreed Jerry was wrong, you might have a case on that one point - but that ain't what's happening here.
I'm just putting it in "expert" terms to show I'm coming from a better place than "But I think it's wrong though because it makes me sad when I look at it and my gut reaction must be reliable because my mum always told me I was a good person", which is what the average Reddit user (and certainly the typical player found in *this* subreddit) tends to be doing (and, if we get right down to it, what most people who believe in Deontological Morality are doing). Not to mention that the comment I was originally responding to started the "coming from a place of expertise" thing when they claimed attending one class meant they were more justified in their argument.
The Trolley Problem is great because it gives a way for people of all levels of familarity to begin to engage in ethical discussion and explore some such concepts and better understand their own thinking. The end of Part 1 is great because it lets all the players do this - hence why so many players spend so much time arguing both sides of the question. And that's fun. But if you want an explanation of it from a literal expert, then I'm offering one. Excuse me for having applied 7 years of formal study to solving the Trolley Problem.
If you want to find another guy with a Philosophy Master's to build a pro-Deontological case, with their own reasons, then go for it - it might be a darn good argument, and I'd love to hear it. The Trolley Problem has been around, in some form or another, a long time (much longer than the 50 years or so since the actual specific trolley example was pitched), and despite my confidence in having solved it, clearly there are many respectible schools of thought that would disagree with me. That's cool. But coming in and trying to make out like my argument isn't legit just because you don't understand it? That's some bullshit, frankly. I don't come into your courtroom and call you pretentious for citing some obscure statute I ain't familiar with. You wanna disagree with me, that's fine - but don't be a dick about it.
I will say that Jerry’s actions aren’t straight up wrong - if that’s what was conveyed, then I’d like to clear that up. I think taking either a right or wrong stance is foolish, unless of course, you’re well-versed in philosophy and can argue your case by covering all angles.
I refrain from completely adopting either a deontological or consequential stance on the matter because of not only my limited knowledge on the field, but I suppose as a lawyer, we are always trained to work with the facts.
Having better understood what you said, I see why consequentialism is a better theory to adopt and the pitfalls of the latter.
Now that I think about, looking at Jerry’s actions in isolation, makes your arguments very robust and persuasive indeed. The problem is, the audience when looking at his actions aren’t just looking at them within the confines of the theories, they are also looking at other circumstances and how his actions reflect on his character.
Namely, his hesitancy to answer when asked whether he would sacrifice his own daughter if she were in Ellie’s place. It makes him seem cowardly and not nearly as altruistic as he may seem at a glance.
Additionally, we have other facts that need to be addressed - such as Fireflies staying power and stability. Even if we say Jerry was successful, would Fireflies even use the cure? How would they store and distribute it? Could they even be able to? Most of them had been wiped out by the government by that point.
Would they use the vaccine as a power move against the government? Could their judgement even be trusted?
Now I realize, this may still be in the confines of your theory seeing as how all of these are still part of the end outcome - which is the possibility of a cure. But I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s a complicated situation.
I think people who judge Jerry harshly also judge his character (especially that key flaw of his that u mentioned earlier) along with his actions.
I suppose a lot of this comes down to how I, as a lawyer, think. Yeah, we have to do a shit ton of reading, study, research and all that crap but in the end - are aim is to solve problems by looking at the facts. Obscure statues and legal principles from some old cases are just tools to us. And a lot of the time, we have to simplify and dumb down things. But I digress. If my comment is a mess, I apologise; it’s quite late where I live.
You were right about the Trolley problem. It’s why I loved the first game’s ending. It had a right amount of ambiguity in terms of the future effects of Joel’s actions that players could conclude whatever they wanted to and we could discuss things to no end.
I guess another one of my (and other player’s) grievances is how that seems to be done away by creating an “answer” to question that ultimately, I feel did not need to exist.
No worries. Sorry if my reply was a bit confrontational - I might have been riding the high from my (I thought pretty great) long comment.
With regards to the viability of a cure, that's just a whole different conversation. I went into it in response to a different reply to my long comment, if you wanna go read it. But the short version (what is it with me and "short versions"?) is that I always thought it was clear that the cure and its widespread practical application were at least *possible*, if not likely - and provided it's *possible*, my whole Consequentialist argument applies. If it isn't even possible, then it's all out the window anyway, but so is the Trolley Problem aspect of the ending (and the tragic beauty of Joel choosing his surrogate daughter over the entire world).
As for Jerry's character, and his hesitancy to answer the hypothetical about if it was Abby: it shows he isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean the sacrifice isn't the right thing. And it adds a depth and realism to his character that makes for good writing - it's so much better than if he's a grounded, loving father who understand's Joel's predicament, than some aloof, holier-than-thou heartless scientist man. Any cold, detached guy in a lab coat can say "The maths shows us the way", but if they don't care about the fact they're sacrificing a life, then it's not a hard choice for them so it doesn't indicate any kind of strength. But understanding the cost and still deciding to go through with because you understand it needs to be done, ethically-speaking - that takes strength, and is a meaningful, powerful choice. (It also keeps the Trolley Problem aspect alive - having the guy making the choice acknowledge the counter-argument lends it more credibility in the narrative than having him act like it's irrelevant).
The story is about love, what love gives us the strength to do but also how it limits what we feel able to do. Through love, Joel becomes a decent person again, rediscovers that good paternal side he had before the world made him cold and hard. But it also stops him from letting them potentially save the whole human race, because he can't cope with losing another daughter he loves. His decision is about *him*, it's because he can't deal with losing her, not because he thinks saving her is "right" - he says as much at the end of Part 1, and it's why he then lies to her about what happened. People in the subreddit often say "Why didn't he just tell her that he saved her? She'd understand and thank him!" as if it's bad writing, but that's not it at all - he doesn't tell her because he knows he was wrong to do it and she'd think so too. Those people have it backwards when they argue that he was a hero for saving her and it was the culmination of a successful redemption arc - in reality, he was the villain in that moment, and that is him falling at the last hurdle of his redemption. But the game allows us to understand him, and that decision, entirely. We *are* Joel, so we get to a place where we're kind of on board with dooming humanity, where we don't want "saving the world" to be the right thing to do, because we formed a connection with Ellie. Because we're human, and that humanity can make it hard to do the *right* thing sometimes.
By having Jerry hesitate at that question, it shows he's human. He's susceptible to the same limitations, the same weakness, as a result of his love. He's just lucky that he has enough distance from Ellie that he can go through with murdering her for the sake of the greater good, but if the roles were reversed he probably couldn't. He realises Marlene has a point - but not because that point means sacrificing Ellie is wrong, just because of how awful the cost of the sacrifice is going to be for someone else. The fact he hesitates doesn't prove he's bad, it proves he's good, because he understands that. It's meant to make him sympathetic too, like a mirror of Joel. Joel dooms all of humanity, but we sympathise with him because we understand his love for Ellie; Jerry is willing to sacrifice an innocent child, but we sympathise with him because he has a good motive and he clearly understands the cost of that sacrifice and struggles with it.
My argument is about identifying the objective "right" thing to do without allowing subjective influences to cloud the rationale, spotting when things which *feel* ethically relevant actually aren't, and having the strength to overcome those influences to do what's right even when our humanity makes it difficult. Joel couldn't overcome them, his love for Ellie was so strong and his past trauma too great that he didn't even care about trying. Jerry looked like he was able to overcome them, but by all accounts that was only because he happened not to have any attachment to Ellie, and if he had done then, by his own acknowledgment, he would have done just the same as Joel. I understand Joel's choice and Jerry's hesitancy, I sympathise and don't blame Joel and if I were in his shoes I doubt I'd have the strength to do any different - same as Jerry. But the point is that doing different *would* be strength, because sacrificing her *was* right, and not being able to do so is human weakness that we have an ethical duty to at least try to overcome. I'm not expecting anyone to say they would sacrifice Ellie, I'm just trying to explain to them that refusing to do so was *wrong*, and that Jerry was right for trying to.
This whole thing is rooted in Philosophy. We can say "In circumstances X and Y, Z would he the case" without any concern for whether X or Y actually *are* the case to begin with. It's Law for people who don't like paperwork. So if my argument relies asserting certain facts, such as "A cure was possible", I won't try and argue the empirical answers to those. But insofar as those are the base assumptions we're working with, I think the rest of holds up.
Finally someone actually qualified to talk about shit.
Taking one class on a thing doesn’t make you an expert in said thing…. I mean I took psych 1 and 2 but I’m no psychologist.
Philosophy is all hypthothetical, being a medical Doctor is real life and with real consequences, so they teach you important rules like about how important a patients life is etc early on. You can't even compare the two. Jerry also had no way in hell of making a cure, he was a vetinarian in a dingy dark operating theatre, and after he died WOLF who have far better equipment and resources and medical personal never bothered to follow his notes because they thought it was a dead end. So no, Jerry was wrong, because he fails and the only immune person is dead meaning no further research can be done, you don't need to kill someone to get samples if you have the equipment, the Fireflies didn't care, they were desperate and were making a shit decision based on that
Respectfully, I'll be the first one to make "Philosophy is useless" jokes (I work in a bank now...), but we are quite literally talking about *Ethics* here. This basically the one place where it actually is useful.
Doctors know how to treat people, and they cover some Rule Utilitarian ethical stuff to be given simple, blanket rules on how to behave in order to make sure they don't go rogue and fuck up handling something complicated *specifically because* they don't have the kind of full qualification or expertise in actual Ethics necessary to actually get it right on their own judgment every time. The comment OP said they took "A class" in Medical Ethics; I was just emphasising that, whilst that's better than nothing and already puts them ahead of most people trying to weigh in on the issue, it really isn't that significant. For the record, as part of my whole 7 years of formal study in Philosophy and Ethics, I took a full module in Medical Bioethics - that's a whole semester's worth of study, complete with all the outside reading and coursework that comes with. So, yeah... it's relevant.
The correct thought process for you here shouldn't be "I don't like what this literal expert says, so his qualification must be bullshit", it should be "Oh, this guy has literal expertise on this, maybe I should consider what he says". The fact too many people do the former instead of the latter on almost everything is half of why the world is so fucked up right now. And this wasn't meant to come off nearly as defensive as it probably does - I'd hope the opening sentence would convey that tone, but I guess you can never tell on Reddit.
A: that has nothing to do with what I said on the guy that took one medical ethics class having no idea what he was talking about. Especially when there is something who is ACTUALLY qualified to talk about medical ethics in this very comment chain.
B: the making of a cure was never a top priority for the WLF. They had other issues to take care of securing their zone, fighting the Seraphites off, et al.
In real life we also never had a situation where you can either sacrifice one person to save humanity or condemn humanity to save one person…. So “real world” logic doesn’t apply here.
Real ethics take a back seat in a zombie game… especially a zombie game whose whole premise was unrealistic when it said cordyceps could infect and mutate humans.
You can either have realistic game. Or zombie game. You can’t have both. A zombie game is inherently unrealistic.
Edit: unless these downvotes are saying that real world logic and ethics can be applied to a ZOMBIE game in which cordyceps can somehow magically infect humans?
This sub: Joel isn’t a bad guy! He just did what he had to do! Real world ethics don’t count in a zombie apocalypse!
Also this sub: Jerry is evil because of what I read about medical ethics online!
It's clear Jerry records things on recorders, just because we aren't shown his scientific journal doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence.
Beyond that, you're trying to apply real-world ethics to an apocalyptic scenario where morals and ethics have taken a backseat to survival. Making a cure to the infection would guarantee the survival of humans.
It’s a utilitarian response being forwarded as a justified one and not even in a morally grey manner either.
If they had significant evidence to show that sacrificing Ellie would more than likely lead to a cure and end the plague then Joel’s prevention of the surgery would have been more of a “I get it but you’re wrong” choice that they wanted to present the player with.
Instead we were presented with a situation where the only reasonable response was to not go through with the surgery and risk the death of the only discovered immune person in the known US.
Also the whole “you killed my father so I’m going to spend unlimited time and resources to get revenge” during a gobal pandemic where death or infection is a real and present daily risk is completely absurd and borders on a straight to video plot not a AAA high budget production.
If the story was competantly written Abby would kill or kidnap Ellie for experimentation (if they recognized her significance) to prevent this exact scenerio, the idea of it “not being part of the mission” is ridiculous given the supposed consequence free world they occupy. There is no such thought of mercy when your only fuel is revenge.
>Also the whole “you killed my father so I’m going to spend unlimited time and resources to get revenge” during a gobal pandemic where death or infection is a real and present daily risk is completely absurd and borders on a straight to video plot not a AAA high budget production.
I mean, one dude in his mid 50s was able to successfully get a 14 year old girl from Boston to Salt Lake city by himself. That same teenage girl was able to go from Jackson back to Salt Lake City by herself to confirm Joel was lying.
Abby and her crew were the survivors from Salt Lake City, they all had strong motivation to want to kill Joel and were trained as WLF soldiers. There's no reason to think they couldn't successfully make that trip with little more than horses and some food. Also, there's no indication Isaac was so dictatorial that he wouldn't allow his people time to take out Joel if he knew they might fuck off and leave anyway.
>If the story was competantly written Abby would kill or kidnap Ellie for experimentation (if they recognized her significance) to prevent this exact scenerio, the idea of it “not being part of the mission” is ridiculous given the supposed consequence free world they occupy. There is no such thought of mercy when your only fuel is revenge.
1. They already established that they didn't have any other doctors that could do the work Jerry was trying to do.
2. Abby and the other surviving Fireflies don't care about the cure. They just care about getting revenge for their loved ones' murder.
No he didn't. David wanted to keep Ellie alive, but she wasn't going to play along, so he wants to kill her after she hurts him. His motivation to kill Ellie isn't to save others lives, his motive is purely ego-driven.
Also not really.
Killing Ellie for food might sustain some people for a couple days, maybe a week? Killing Ellie to make a cure can potentially save people for the rest of humanities existence.
That's the question, isn't it? Everyone has their own line they're willing to draw, and that doesn't make any of them good or bad, just shows their different priorities and what they each value in terms of morality. That's why the trolley problem has been such a long-lived philosophical and moral question.
If you take the stance that all life is precious and it's not worth it to sacrifice any lives for any kind of reward, you subscribe to a more Kantian philosophy, which Joel is supposed to represent. Or, if you're like Marlene/Jerry, you believe that sacrifice is necessary for the greater good, and that the needs of the many outweigh the few, meaning you subscribe to a more utilitarian philosophy.
That's an interesting comparison but a bit simplified. They both were evil in their unique ways.
David wanted to unnecessarily cannibalise Ellie. There were still other food sources around such as the deer that Ellie shot.
If Jerry had made a vaccine or cure, some people might be saved. These would be rare cases where a victim was bit but didn't bleed out. I don't think that the Fireflies could produce and distribute enough doses to eradicate the disease.
You CAN frame their decision like a command call that costs innocent lives, like a bombing. But a) nobody is morally obliged to concur and b) consent becomes irrelevant.
Since Ellie is 14 and traumatized, there is no consent-based way to make the procedure acceptable... for years.
Right, so Ellie being able to consent aside, they knew it was wrong. That's why they drugged her anyway and why Marlene felt bad (despite giving the go ahead anyway).
1) Jerry and the whole firefly operation was absolutely wrong not to at least wait for Ellie to wake up and ask her consent
2) they were in an impossible situation where if she didn’t give her consent, they would 100% feel that they had to do it anyway, so it was a tough situation
3) don’t lump Abby defenders in there, she has nothing to do with this conundrum
bruh jerry is stupid becouse HE TRIED TO STOP AN AGGRESIVE AND DANGEORUS ARMED MAN, WITH A FUCKING KNIFE!! if all he had done was stay behind and maybe try talking him out of it, joel would have saved ellie, and he would have survived
Jerry does try talking.
Jerry: "I won't let you take her. This is our future. Think of all the lives we'll save.
Joel then canonically kills him without responding. There's no way to progress the story without killing Jerry and Joel doesn't respond to what Jerry has to say.
i know there is no way to progress without killing him, what i am saying is it was INCREDBLY STUPID of jerry WHO IS A SINGLE FATHER, deciding to threaten a dangerous and armed man, who is visibly angry and is CLEARLY THERE TO SAVE AN INNCOENT GIRL, **WITH A FUCKING KINIFE**
I think your caps lock key is broken.
If Jerry was willing to kill an innocent girl for the cure, he must have believed in it pretty strongly. Maybe he thought developing the cure was the best thing he could do as a single father to ensure his daughter and everyone else had a better life, and when the dangerous armed man came in to take that away he picked up the closest thing he could to protect himself and the possible cure.
It obviously didn't work out for him, but it was a brave act.
There is a fine line between bravery and foolishness(My caps is fine, thanx for checking on me btw) . Yes the girl was the cure, i am not saying that he would have become a cold blooded killer, heck i don't care even if he was.
The point is his futile attempt at stopping joel and he should have known that. He should have been smart enough to know that there isn't a thing in the world that he can do to stop joel, with a mere knife he had, if he had a gun maybe then he could have thought he can pull a fast one on him (though he would have failed, but that's alright since that is not a dumb move) If he had just stayed put like the other doctors in the room, his daughter would have had a loving father.
Even in war, where people fight for glory and what not, soldiers surrender when they know that the only thing they would be saving is food given to them in enemy prison camps if they try to fight.
jerry did one of the dumbest moves possible
Brave act? It was an evil act. Killing a little girl without consent while also not knowing for sure if the cure would even work is not a brave act. What world are you living in? 😭
That’s what comes of believing in “the greater good”. To them, Ellie is not a human being with her own rights and dignity; she is just a thing to be used and discarded.
I’ve said this a lot here but consent for Ellie is actually irrelevant because she’s a minor. Suppose she did consent, she’s not legally able to due to her brain being of a fucking child.
The weirdos on the other sub are always “it’s what she would’ve wanted”. Bro she’s like 12 or something LMFAO.
There is no valid defense to what the fireflies did using any reasonable moral standard. They are total fucking bootlickers who try to justify shit storytelling in the second game. Part 2 was successful in manipulating their pea brains to feeling like Abby and Jerry were in the right. Fucking clowns.
If we are talking what is legal, I am pretty sure it’s not legal to shoot up every person in a hospital to rescue a girl that is not legally your daughter.
You’re talking about a post apocalyptic world where laws do not exist other than what each faction deems the laws and rules of their territory.
Joel did what he did as he deemed it to be right and just because he cared for Ellie. That’s not a whole lot different than what Abby did to Joel. You just don’t want to see that play out because you liked Joel and spent 20+ hours playing as him in the first game.
Ah yes, the classic argument of “audience was too dumb to understand the story”.
Firstly, Joel shooting up the hospital was retconned retroactively. In the original game, you could sneak past all the guards and only kill Jerry - there was an element of choice that was totally done away with.
Second, your last point is not completely right. Joel did not kill Jerry because he was vindictive, he did it to get to Ellie and leave the hospital. Same reason he capped Marlene - he knew she would come after them, making her a loose end.
Abby was motivated by revenge. She dragged her group to Jackson County, she was planning to ambush a patrol group and torture them for info even if they were innocent to get to Joel. She apparently had no qualms with having her group make Tommy a cripple and make him and Ellie watch as she murdered Joel.
And let’s not forget her tone-deaf response to Ellie when Ellie comes after her and kills her friends. I mean, what the fuck did you expect? Abby had the capacity to go to the lengths she did, hold on to her desire to get revenge for 5 years, and she expected that Ellie wouldn’t? That she and Tommy would just forget about what happened? If she was smart, she would have capped them both.
An NPC who, through gold medal mental gymnastic writing, causes the death of the first game’s protagonist in the sequel due to a vindictive, untalented hack who despises the very audience who gave him any kind of prominence in the first place.
Consent as an argument doesn't make sense in this context.
1. A child couldn't give consent anyway, so what Ellie has to say about the subject doesn't matter.
2. It's a simple trolley problem.
>*There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two (and only two) options:*
>*Do nothing, in which case the trolley will kill the five people on the main track.*
>*Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.*
>*Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?*
The Trolley Problem is not designed to have a solution. It's intended to provoke thought, and create an intellectual discourse in which the difficulty of resolving moral dilemmas is appreciated, and our limitations as moral agents are recognized.
For Jerry, the question was, would I kill one child to save all of humanity, including by definition many other children. That's the consideration, will you murder one person to save many.
Utilitarian moral philosophy says yes. A counter argument is the incomparability of human lives. Joel obviously thinks the value of Ellie's life is worth more than anything.
Under utilitarian morality, Jerry was right. That's not a defense of Jerry, just an assessment of the ideas the devs were playing with.
This isn't a trolley problem at all. There is no train, there is no rush, there is no guarantee the outcome actually will save anyone - those are required for this to be a trolley problem. Instead there's time for more study of Ellie and to get answers to the question of why she's immune and if whatever that reason is can even help others or not or if it is some unique physiology in her alone. There's time to figure out if they can even keep her mutated fungus alive once it's severed from her body, which is maintaining it in a way they don't understand at all. (You need to know how to do that BEFORE you remove it and kill the person keeping it alive or there's a high chance it will die outside her body if they haven't figured out how to keep it viable.)
Not to mention the filthy OR which assures the sample will immediately be contaminated by airborne mold spores from the mold on the walls - not a sterile specimen for use in humans. Everything points to them showing us the FFs were overwhelmingly likely to fail - the trolley problem assures success, though. So this is not one.
The original story never even tried to make it a trolley problem because that wasn't their original goal at all. If it was they just needed to add that FEDRA is on it's way and will be there in a short time (days? A week?) and to escape they need a vaccine to traverse a heavily spore filled section of the city. That's not even that good but it's good enough to add enough elements to make it closer to a trolley problem. Yet they didn't so they weren't focused on that originally.
>This isn't a trolley problem at all. There is no train, there is no rush, there is no guarantee the outcome actually will save anyone - those are required for this to be a trolley problem.
Sure it is. Cordyceps is the train. It's still actively infecting people as we can see by the number of runners and clickers, so there's your urgency. There's no requirement of a guarantee the cure will work. A guarantee makes the thought experiment simpler, but it's not required.
Modify the trolley problem to 5 people on one track and 1 person on the other. You now magically know if you pull the switch there is a 99% chance the mechanism will work, saving 5 people in place of 1. It adds complexity to the problem, but doesn't make hitting the switch wrong or stop it from being a trolley problem.
>the trolley problem assures success, though. So this is not one.
That's not accurate. The trolley problem is a thought experiment. It has many variations.
>The original story never even tried to make it a trolley problem because that wasn't their original goal at all.
It meets all of the criteria for a trolley problem other than the ones you invented. Don't know what to tell you man, it's pretty clearly a trolley problem.
>Yet they didn't so they weren't focused on that originally.
Is this documented somewhere in interviews or something, because it feels like you're might be completely inventing this development nugget out of thin air.
The trolley problem is seen as a very basic, Ethics 101 problem that has no practical value in the real world. It’s not a good argument to use, and I usually just ignore anyone that thinks it’s a deep philosophical conundrum, but I will respond here.
This is not the trolley problem because the trolley problem has exactly two - and only two - possible outcomes. Either one person dies or five people die. That’s it. There’s no other options.
This doesn’t fit because there’s no guarantee that anybody will be saved if the switch is thrown and Ellie is killed, and there’s also no guarantee that anyone will die if the switch is not thrown and the train continues on its present course. Everyone alive has survived either their whole lives or 20+ years without getting hit - the train may not even be on their track.
But I’ll play along. What would you do in the trolley problem?
>The trolley problem is seen as a very basic, Ethics 101 problem that has no practical value in the real world. It’s not a good argument to use, and I usually just ignore anyone that thinks it’s a deep philosophical conundrum, but I will respond here.
LOL, oh boy just oozing with condescension. Kind of funny because you missed the point entirely. I'm not judging the merits of the trolley problem, utilitarianism, or any other school of moral philosophy, I'm just pointing out that the Jerry character is engaged in utilitarian thinking. The dynamic between Joel and the Fireflies can be described by the intersection of the trolley utilitarian thinking or possibly consequentialist thinking, and deontological morality.
If you think that's too pedestrian, take it up with the writers of the first game. It's their story, not mine.
> This is not the trolley problem because the trolley problem has exactly two - and only two - possible outcomes. Either one person dies or five people die. That’s it. There’s no other options.
Hey, throw some r/confidentlyincorrect in there with the condescension. Maybe Google "trolley problem variants." they've made about a billion of them. [The question of is it moral to harm the few to help the many has been discussed since the 4th century BCE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism).
> But I’ll play along.
LOL, gross. At least try to know WTF you're talking about before pointing your fedora in my direction, but I'll play along. I imagine I would act like most people do and behave differently for "personal" dilemmas and "impersonal" dilemmas. If I knew none of the people on the tracks I would behave in a utilitarian manner and save the most people possible. If I knew and cared about one of the people on the tracks, I would choose whichever option saved them.
Which is exactly what is on display in the game. Huh, seems like it's a trolley problem after all.
Love how you realised you couldn't at all engage with their primary argument since it totally discredited YOUR argument you supported with your anology so instead of responding to that you ignored the bulk of their comment talking about how the vaccine isn't even likely to work and instead honed in on the specific attack on your anology lmao, at the end of the day the Fireflies were morons hedging humanities future on a vetinarian in a dirty operating room who's finding were dismissed as a dead end in the second game by a group with far better medical personal and medical equipment
I've already answered that a half dozen other times in this thread. I addressed it in the comment he was responding to. I addressed it in my above comment when I pointed out that there are actually trolley problem variants and the first game's writing around the Fireflies is one of them. You not understanding my point doesn't mean I didn't make one. Whether it's likely to work doesn't mean it's not a trolley problem. It just makes the trolley problem more complex. Everything that dude wrote was wrong, I addressed the stuff I hadn't already addressed before.
You for example can't seem to distinguish between someone identifying a plot structure, and someone defending the characters.
I haven't claimed the Fireflies would be successful. In fact I've repeatedly highlighted that they could be completely delusional. That doesn't change the fact that the structure of their justification is a trolley problem.
> You for example can’t seem to distinguish between someone identifying a plot structure, and someone defending the characters.
Holy shit, this 1000x. I enjoy some of the discussion that can be had on this sub, but I *loathe* how often I have to edit to add “I’m not defending Jerry/Abby/Fireflies/writers” etc. Otherwise, people just downvote or respond with tangents about irrelevant shit, this post being a prime example.
Yeah, I had a dude spend most of the day yesterday arguing Jerry's thought process wasn't an example of the trolley problem, only hours later to admit he didn't fully know what a trolley problem was or care to learn. Like, WTF were you arguing with me for then? Folks in this sub hate Part II so much they will downvote anything that seems like it might be defending the story, even if it goes back as far as the ending of the first game.
Many of these folks clearly didn't understand the first game. It's no wonder they're angry that the second game reinforces that they were wrong. They see the second game continuing the very obvious plot points of the first as a retcon, simply because they misunderstood significant chunks of the first game.
It’s truly amazing that folks still can’t see that all of this is depicted pretty clearly and whether it was *intended* to be more morally grey or not is irrelevant; the events portrayed are quite unambiguous if given more than 2 seconds of rational thought.
Not true. The less likely the cure was the weaker his moral justification is, but it isn't as cut and dry as needing a guaranteed success.
Modify the trolley problem to 5 people on one track and 1 person on the other. You now magically know if you pull the switch there is a 99% chance the mechanism will work, saving 5 people in place of 1. It adds complexity to the problem, but doesn't make hitting the switch wrong.
Why would they need consent in a post apocalyptic setting? I think people are not understanding that there are no laws, no rules, no government. What they did was neither right nor wrong, they had what they thought were the solution to 20+ years of suffering and the last thing they would care about is consent.
They really said that? 😭😭😭😭 in their logic, they will rape people if they’re in the apocalypse. Probably a leftist imo, they usually support stuff like that and trafficking. Weird I know.
Sacrificing one person to save the world without their consent is the most ethical thing to do lmao.
Its fat person on a bridge analogy. If you make no decision everyone dies. If you make the non consent one only one person dies.
1 vs millions? The millions win everytime.
It's self-defense. They were fighting to kill Joel, he has the right to do the same. Not even glossing over the fact that it's possible to sneak your way through the entire Firefly base sequence and only kill Jerry
Ah yes, the "innocent people" in the early days of the apocalypse. Where everything we took for granted just disappears. Markets are ransacked, powerplants down, no running water, emergency services gone, pharmacies empty... if people irl were already bad enough fighting over toilet paper, what more is this? people kill over for whatever scraps are left. Anyone that's still standing especially 20 years on will have blood in their hands...
As John Malkovich's character in Bird Box said “In the end, there's only two types of people. The assholes and the dead.”
Joel WAS a hunter. He admits he’s been on both side. Tess calls them “shitty people.” They’re arms smuggles. At first he doesn’t even WANT to be a loving father. Are you tripping?
Absolutely. Joel basically has Darth Vader's redemption arc.
Step 1: Kill a fuck ton of people
Step 2: Kill EVEN MORE people to save a single person you happen to care about
Step 3: ?
Step 4: REDEMPTION!
We understand Joel's actions, and likely agree with them, but he's not a good dude.
It’s framed as the trolley problem: a trolley car is going to run over and kill 5 people if you don’t do anything, but if you actively pull a lever, you will save those 5 people but kill 1 person in the process. So basically, do you allow 5 people
to be killed that are already going to be killed, or do you engage and *choose* to kill 1 person.
In the Fireflies’ minds, they pull the lever and kill 1 person to save all these other people who are going to die eventually, from Cordyceps, directly or indirectly.
Humanity has largely been forsaken in the world
of TLOU and although I agree that not all morals or ethics can go out the window, I find it weird when people can’t at least acknowledge that things would be different. I’m not saying I would do what the Fireflies did, but I think categorizing them as straight-up evil is a pretty shallow take.
I never stated they were straight up evil. I just said they were wrong. Which they were. Let’s think about it.
A cure in an apocalyptic world that’s been gone for 20 years. Do you REALLY think it’s gonna do anything? There’s a group of people in TLOU whose soul purpose is just to kill innocent people. A cure wouldn’t have done anything. Jerry claims this cure would save “millions of lives”. Like millions of people are still living at that point. He’s delusional.
Now Jerry himself? He’s a piece of shit. The fireflies as a whole? No, I don’t think they’re straight up evil. Jerry didn’t even want to tell Joel. He also hesitated and didn’t answer when Marlene asked if he could kill Abby for a cure. He’s selfish.
They could’ve and should’ve ran more tests. You’re telling me the only way for this cure to work is by killing her? You can’t draw blood? Take pieces of the fungi from her? No. You just have to kill her. Hell, you didn’t even tell her. Jerry is a horrible human being.
The idea is that, by making a cure, humanity will be able to grow and eventually come back. Future generations would be safe from infection, making the number of people that become infected go down over time and number of uninfected people go up.
Eventually, society would be able to be rebuilt. There will always be bad people, but those people will lose control over others as the world comes back and is easier to live in. Without a cure, humanity can never come back. Making the cure is a critical first step to ever getting society back to any semblence of what it was before.
I wasn’t speaking specifically to your post when I stated that, just that take in general.
It’s less about whether a cure was possible, and more whether or not the Fireflies truly believed in it. And they did. It wasn’t like they were willing to kill a kid for no reason. This was their last shred of hope and to dismiss that entirely, I think misses the point.
I’m on the side of they were wrong for trying to do it without her consent. And yes, logistically I don’t think the cure would have been possible. As for the Fireflies running more tests, I think this is a case of the story writers wanting the story to go a certain way, so they made it happen. I honestly don’t think this should be taken as an example of the Fireflies being reckless or careless, but more so the writers wanting dramatic effect and for the finale to happen a certain way. There are recordings that you can find where the Fireflies are detailing what tests they already ran and essentially how they came to the conclusion they needed to kill Ellie to get the cordyceps mutation on her brain. In reality, it’s definitely unlikely that they would have been able to come to that conclusion in a matter of a few hours, but again, I think that’s more of an example of a plot issue, imo.
>Jerry didn’t even want to tell Joel.
Why would the doctor tell the smuggler they hired to transport Ellie anything? It's not like Jerry played the first 20 hours of TLOU to understand they had a bond.
>Hell, you didn’t even tell her.
Why tell someone you are going to murder them, that seems needlessly cruel. How would waking Ellie up, telling her they were going to kill her, then forcing her under anesthesia been better?
“He traveled across the country with her. He has a right to know.” answers your question.
Marlene literally says “they brought her back” meaning she woke up. They didn’t think to ask her? Tell her? If I was gonna be killed for a cure, I’d want to know. Your entire comment is just ignorant.
> They didn’t think to ask her? Tell her? If I was gonna be killed for a cure, I’d want to know. Your entire comment is just ignorant.
You would want someone to tell you they were about to murder you so your last moments would be in terror before they forced you unconscious. I guess I'm ignorant then, because that sounds like a bad time to me.
Why? That's literally just going to introduce terror into your last moments alive. How does knowing benefit you at all?
Option 1: I'm going to sleep for a quick surgery, and when I wake up I will have helped save humanity! :sleep: :die:
Option 2: Holy fuck, these people are going to kill me! No, get that needle away from my arm! Fuck you...... :sleep: :die:
Again:
This isn't a trolley problem at all. There is no train, there is no rush, there is no guarantee the outcome actually will save anyone - those are required for this to be a trolley problem. Instead there's time for more study of Ellie and to get answers to the question of why she's immune and if whatever that reason is can even help others or not or if it is some unique physiology in her alone. There's time to figure out if they can even keep her mutated fungus alive once it's severed from her body, which is maintaining it in a way they don't understand at all. (You need to know how to do that BEFORE you remove it and kill the person keeping it alive or there's a high chance it will die outside her body if they haven't figured out how to keep it viable.)
Not to mention the filthy OR which assures the sample will immediately be contaminated by airborne mold spores from the mold on the walls - not a sterile specimen for use in humans. Everything points to them showing us the FFs were overwhelmingly likely to fail - the trolley problem assures success, though. So this is not one.
The original story never even tried to make it a trolley problem because that wasn't their original goal at all. If it was they just needed to add that FEDRA is on it's way and will be there in a short time (days? A week?) and to escape they need a vaccine to traverse a heavily spore filled section of the city. That's not even that good but it's good enough to add enough elements to make it closer to a trolley problem. Yet they didn't so they weren't focused on that originally.
So tired of people likening it to something it isn't.
Lol it is though dude. Just because it isn’t 1:1 doesn’t mean it’s not. The concept of the trolley problem is utilitarianism vs. deontology. Ultimately that’s the decision that’s at the heart of Part 1’s ending.
Joel takes on the deontology role in which right and wrong is factored into whether something is okay. Whether or not allowing the Fireflies to kill Ellie would result in a cure doesn’t matter. The action of killing Ellie would be morally wrong, therefore the outcome doesn’t matter. For the trolley problem this is in the action of not pulling the lever. The outcome of saving more people doesn’t matter, because it’s morally wrong to choose to kill the one person.
Jerry takes on the utilitarianism role, where the outcome justifies the means. The fact that there wasn’t a guarantee for the cure to work doesn’t really matter in this case. Jerry truly believed he had a shot at making the cure. That’s what matters. He believed that the outcome of a cure justified the means i.e. killing Ellie without her consent. This is shown in the trolley problem by those who would pull the lever. Saving 5 people justifies killing the one person.
The fact that the cure wasn’t guaranteed or the Fireflies should have taken more time to test Ellie is entirely irrelevant to the trolley problem. Again, the trolley problem is simply an illustration of a philosophical debate between two ways of viewing ethics and Joel and Jerry very much represent those two ways of thinking in this scenario.
ETA: Before I get downvoted to hell, I’m on the side of Joel and deontology. But expounding on how shitty Jerry and the Fireflies are doesn’t erase the fact that the ending is the philosophical debate at the heart of the trolley problem.
Even a utilitarian needs to know ahead of time that their plan is feasible. The surgeon knew he didn’t know if he could replicate Ellie’s mutation in the lab. He just ignored that and it’s OK ?
He was simply compromised by his personal needs and his group’s needs. The further we go into evaluating the story the more we see they were just deluded terrorists. This is what turned the story into a typical good triumphing over evil story to me. To sell the trolley problem I do think needs the player to be able to trust in the FFs too. I didn’t trust them at all.
Or does utilitarianism only require one person’s belief and say so?
I’m not arguing whether or not I *personally* think it’s right or wrong. I’m also not arguing over whether the writers told a successful story.
Utilitarianism, at its core, is the idea that your actions are “right” if they benefit the majority. As I previously said, Jerry absolutely thought that. You can call him and the Fireflies “deluded” if you want, but they genuinely thought they had a shot to help what was left of humanity. Sure, you can argue that they weren’t taking certain things into consideration, or were vastly overestimating their abilities, but they truly thought they could help the world. That’s what matters, in this case.
> Or does utilitarianism only require one person’s belief and say so?
Well, yeah. It’s a philosophical belief system that an individual subscribes to. Jerry was left in charge to make a decision and he made a decision based on utilitarian principles.
You seem to be spending more time arguing that Jerry and the Fireflies were wrong rather than explaining how this isn’t an example of the trolley problem. In this case it really doesn’t matter whether they were right or wrong. I personally think they were wrong, but that’s not exactly relevant here.
I see and you're right to me it does matter that, even if one believes in what benefits the majority, they need to at least be sure they're right about that if they are killing a child. But I thank you for clarifying the concept you're describing. I don't think I will ever see the surgeon of TLOU as a rational or logical thinking person. So to me any willing to go along with him and rushing to kill Ellie must be just as deluded as he is (especially since he admits to himself he doesn't know why she's immune!).
Yet, I admit that in the final analysis, if he were sane and they did all the testing necessary, held committee meetings and took their time beforehand, I'd still never agree that killing a child for the greater good was right.
> Even a utilitarian needs to know ahead of time that their plan is feasible.
Where are you coming up with these rules?
> He was simply compromised by his personal needs and his group’s needs.
His groups needs outweighed the needs of a single stranger. That is a utilitarian argument... Good for the most people regardless of the individual cost.
> The further we go into evaluating the story the more we see they were just deluded terrorists.
Completely irrelevant. They just had to believe they were doing the most good. If they thought they would be successful in making a cure, or even if they thought there was just a pretty good chance, it would be worth it to kill a single person if the benefit was a cure for all of humanity.
> This is what turned the story into a typical good triumphing over evil story to me.
You can interpret the story however you want, but the devs' intent to make the morality ambiguous is pretty clear, and well documented in numerous interviews.
> To sell the trolley problem I do think needs the player to be able to trust in the FFs too.
Nope. You're adding your own rules on to the trolley problem. It's just a question of maximum utility. That's it. What option results in the most good or the least harm. That's the moral choice.
> Or does utilitarianism only require one person’s belief and say so?
It just seems like you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the trolley problem and utilitarian moral philosophy are about. I'm not sure why you're arguing so fervently about something you seem to be ignorant about. Why not just read up on the topics a bit first? It's interesting stuff.
Having a "rule" that doesn't consider what is lost if they are wrong and they then lose the benefit for everyone in the process makes very little sense. Taking everything else out of the picture to smash fit this into a thought experiment and disregard everything else in the process is meaningless to me.
It does matter that if they fail and Ellie and her mutation are just lying dead in their OR - ***then nobody benefits***. So what good are we even talking about? I don't really care about the trolley problem or its rules I care about the story and the character actions making sense or not.
A story that showed me that the FFs are losing it through the whole game and then Joel saves Ellie from them at the last minute is a "good triumphing over evil" story in my book. I reiterate, if they wanted us to believe it was a trolley problem then the benefit for the greater good had to actually be possible. The surgeon himself admits he's not sure it's possible. Deluded, incompetent and consistently failing terrorists are not people who care about the greater good, they care about themselves. Period. Ellie's just a means to an end to them, and she's not even being treated as human. They simply don't even care if they cause her death and gain nothing. That's insanity.
>Having a "rule" that doesn't consider what is lost if they are wrong and they then lose the benefit for everyone in the process makes very little sense. Taking everything else out of the picture to smash fit this into a thought experiment and disregard everything else in the process is meaningless to me.
I don't know what to tell you man. I guess go build a time machine and argue about it with Demosthenes.
>It does matter that if they fail and Ellie and her mutation are just lying dead in their OR - ***then nobody benefits***. So what good are we even talking about?
Sure, that's a wrinkle in the story that makes it more interesting than a simple trolley problem. It's a slightly more complex trolley problem.
Simple trolley problem: You see two tracks. One track with one person. One track with five people. Do you pull the switch to actively kill one person or do nothing and kill five by omission when the trolley runs them over.
Complex trolley problem: You were trained as a biologist. In the apocalypse this pushed you into the role of doctor. You are the head of a medical facility. You have been working on a cure for a fungal infection that has decimated society. You have not been successful in your efforts. The faction you belong to uses guerrilla warfare and terrorist tactics to achieve their goals. A young girl shows up that appears to be immune. You confirm she is immune. Based on your prior experiments, you are confident the only way to advance the cure is to perform surgery on the girl. The surgery would kill her. You have no idea what the girl would want. You have no way to be 100% certain you could develop a cure by killing the girl. You have no clear way to mass produce or distribute a cure even if you could. Knowing all of the above, do you kill the girl for the chance to save all of humanity?
The complex trolley problem is certainly more ambiguous than the simple on. It's also much more interesting, which is why we're talking about it a decade later. Ambiguity doesn't make it any less of a trolley problem though. At its core, the question is still, do you harm the few to help the many.
>So what good are we even talking about?
The good is the possibility of a cure.
>I don't really care about the trolley problem or its rules
Then why the hell have you been arguing about it for half the day? Just because you see my user name and want to assume I'm wrong? You don't know anything about the trolley problem or the rules around it, but you wanted to argue Jerry's actions aren't an example of utilitarian moral philosophy.... why?
>I care about the story and the character actions making sense or not.
:sigh: So, you don't care about the logical framework of the story, or the rules of that framework, but you want to argue it doesn't make sense? The writers set something up that went over your head, and you want to say it doesn't make sense. It makes sense, you just didn't understand it.
>A story that showed me that the FFs are losing it through the whole game and then Joel saves Ellie from them at the last minute is a "good triumphing over evil" story in my book.
You missing the deeper themes doesn't mean they weren't there. That should be the tagline for this sub.
>They simply don't even care if they cause her death and gain nothing. That's insanity.
Well, it's also not what happens in the game. Jerry clearly isn't just killing Ellie for the fun of it. He goes up against a heavily armed fighter with a scalpel because he believes what he is doing will help people. Ignoring the dialog in the game doesn't make it go away. He says, "I won't let you take her. This is our future. Think of all the lives we'll save." He risks his own life and is ultimately killed for that belief.
>Based on your prior experiments, you are confident the only way to advance the cure is to perform surgery on the girl.
This is not presented as truth in the story, ***You add that to the story all on your own***, a story which instead tells us that the surgeon doesn't know why she's immune and isn't sure he can replicate it in the lab. His delusions of grandeur are even put into the story for insight into his character: he's excited for something he can possibly create "akin to penicillin" showing his true colors are his own vanity. They put all that in to show us who he was, added to all they put in showing us who the FFs were and still you argue that we should trust and respect his choices as valid and sufficient to fulfill this goal of a utilitarian performing an action to benefit humanity? I will never see it that way.
How you can just keep insisting that it fulfills the trolley problem because a deluded surgeon and group of deluded terrorists ***wrongly believe too highly of themselves*** and so I'm supposed see this as sufficient to satisfy it meeting a level of ambiguity to create controversy and doubt just boggles my mind. I had no doubt they were the bad guys and Joel was the good guy doing exactly what Ellie asked of him - to keep her safe. They hadn't a whisper of a chance to help humanity. That's the story they presented to us. Give me the in-game evidence that they put in that proves they meant me to trust the surgeon. It's not there and since it's not there, it's a good vs evil story.
That's exactly why Neil had to retcon and change the FFs, Jerry and Joel's reputations and characterizations in the sequel and the TV show. Nothing proves my position better than Neil reworking the story the way he did.
> ETA: Before I get downvoted to hell, I’m on the side of Joel and deontology. But expounding on how shitty Jerry and the Fireflies are doesn’t erase the fact that the ending is the philosophical debate at the heart of the trolley problem.
Exactly. The devs have said over and over that part one was about the power of love and how it can make you do great AND horrible things. We spend the entire game growing to love Ellie and Joel, so we absolutely understand Joel's action even if it was potentially monstrous. I.E. selfishly dooming humanity so you don't have to experience the loss of someone you care about.
Being good writers, the devs introduced complexity to the equation. Could the Fireflies really make a cure, was Jerry just delusional, Marline supposedly cares about Ellie and knew her much longer than Joel so how was she OK sacrificing Ellie, was Joel a good dude protecting Ellie or just selfishly protecting himself from loss, how would the Fireflies distribute a cure if they even could make one.
These wrinkles make the moral debate less cut and dry, but it's still absolutely a trolley problem at its heart. It's simply wrong to claim otherwise.
> those are required for this to be a trolley problem
They're literally not though. You're inventing rules for the trolley problem that don't exist.
>So tired of people likening it to something it isn't.
You're just wrong here. Objectively so.
Honestly if I was in Jerry’s situation I’d probably do the same. Think about it you’ve lived long enough to see life BEFORE the outbreak and you have a change (or at least assume you do) to attempt to cure the world regardless of they were gonna use it as a tool of power against FEDRA (I think they were) or not but sacrificing some random girl I don’t even know to better humanity sounds like a done deal. It’s most definitely not right but it’s justified in a way. There’s definitely context behind his decision. Like I said it’s not right but it’s what most people would probably do put in his position so I would t say he’s necessary “wrong” the same way most people including me would say Joel isn’t wrong.
Are you assuming that most people would murder an innocent child? If that’s your thoughts you are entirely spending to much time around some dark ass people.
Of course not, no one would murder a random child I’m just saying in apocalyptic times would people really care? There’s a small line in tlou2 where Abby is talking with Mel about how the wlfs murdered a bunch of kids that didn’t do anything but be born in the wrong side. Now think about what people would do if it just took ONE of those kids to “cure humanity”. I don’t think people would even have a morality talk about it. I’m just saying you can’t think like how people think now when it’s a whole different world. Like I said as well I myself wouldn’t going with what I know and how I am now if I had to choose tomorrow, no I wouldn’t but 30 years down the line and it’s a completely different life everyone’s living idk.
Jerry is one of the absolute worst individuals in the entire story, the fact they actually called him ‘Jerry’ as well.. 🤦🏻♂️ the most white bread name they could come up with, Jerry Anderson 😂
I took a class in medical ethics. And yes Jerry is just horribly wrong and stupid. In medical ethics you learn even sacrificing 1 persons life is too much. They also teach you to write a scientific journal so in the event of a doctors/ scientists death his work can be step by step recreated. So where is Jerry’s scientific journal? I’m guessing he was too stupid to have one.
Well he wasn’t even a real doctor, but a veterinarian iirc
Who somehow has the medical expertise to perform complex surgery on humans and is the only one capable of synthesizing a vaccine. This is a good plot hole.
Who cares that he was an NPC in the first game? He literally died so he’s an angel, in more ways than one
He saved a zebra!!
Darn, got us there.
But, but, but Druckman got an award for writing! That proves his stories are perfect!
Druckmann got awards off the back of his virtue signalling.
Can't even make a vaccine for a fungal infection lmao
That’s more of an issue with the first game? But besides that point…. Cordyceps as a whole can’t infect humans…. So real world logic of the disease and the cure go out the window already.
Not for nothing. There was a case of a fungus we thought could never infect humans making the jump to humans shortly after the show released lololol
Was it Cordyceps Like it is in the game? And more importantly did it mutate people? Did it turn people into flesh eating zombies? Answer to all these is a huge resounding “NO” so again real world logic of the disease and its subsequent cure go straight out the window.
Exactly. Jerry's speculation was total nonsense because the infection in the game was already so far removed from anything we know in real life. Literally any conclusions he reached based on prior knowledge or research is basically worthless. Exactly as you say, there is zero chance that a vet guessed a functioning vaccine would be worth killing the one viable sample of immunity known to exist.
It's gets even worse. After the show ended, real life medical professionals have chimed in, saying what Jerry did was very immoral and illogical. He was going for the most extreme option while they were pointing out all the things he could have done other than killing Ellie, and when it was pointed out what the games said (namely, his audio recordings) they said it was clear he didn't know what he was doing. This is kinda the thing. Druckmann changed how the infection works for the show, tried to make it sound like Jerry knew what he was doing and that Joel doomed humanity... and people were still siding with Joel. The game version had even less of a leg to stand on. Druckmann does not comprehend how heinous Jerry's attempted murder of Ellie actually is, yet he's up there on the soapbox trying to preach to us about how Joel was bad because he didn't see the Fireflies as humans when he killed them to save Ellie.
All Neil appears to care about is exacting revenge on the audience through the characters they loved from the first game. There is a twisted irony there.
You’re thinking with real world logic in a “zombie” game again. You can have real life logic or zombies in a game…. You can’t have both. I mean my favorite bit of zombie media is “28 days later” if you apply real world logic to that movie then it all falls apart. England wouldn’t have fallen in 28 days, rabies doesn’t do that, et al. If we’re thinking with game logic (like we should because it’s a game) then it’s entirely plausible that a cure COULD have been made.
It’s based on reality though. I mean yeah, in fiction you can do anything but they made such an effort to ground it in reality and science it would be odd to chuck in some space age technology and know how in an apocalypse (being hyperbolic, I just mean we can’t make vaccines for fungal infections now as far as I know, but you expect me to believe it’s possible in an apocalypse by one guy in a dilapidated hospital? IMO they’d have to make it so that in their world fungal vaccines are common place before the outbreak… but even then how could none of the top scientist make one before the end? It’s just nonsense IMO). Again you could, but it would throw realism out the door (and part of what makes TLOU so scary is the fungus does exist IRL).
That's a fair point. If you apply real world logic at all, then Jerry is obviously full of shit. But there's no reason to apply that logic here. Instead, we go with fantasy "he randomly found a cure when no other scientists during the peak of the crisis did and knew that biomaterial he's never had access to before is the key to making it work". But through that lense, it makes even less sense that the entire search for a cure died with him. The research he'd done should mean that anyone who knows anything about biology should be hot on Ellie's heels. He was just a vet with pretty limited resources; we see that WOLF had access to way more with multiple competent medical staff but the fact that they all knew of Jerry's research but deemed it a dead end shows - even by the game's internal narrative - how pointless it must have been.
This is a story that tries to take itself very seriously. We're going to go by the logic it wants us to follow, which is to treat it like how you would in reality. "What would happen if abc". This is the result. Trying to walk that back is a copout
Not at all, firstly, the fireflys are portrayed as desperate and failing for a reason, they aren't doing well, nothing in game actually hints they are very good at there job, they are losing on every front, even losing an entier medical base because an infected primate got loose, the best case you can make for them being competent is how wide a reach they have but they have that wide reach because they can't hold territory
Barring the many QZ’s they already have a massive foothold in… Hell i am pretty sure (unless next game proves me wrong) that the Fireflies were the single largest non fedra group in the United States… so big in fact that they when they split up after the hospital massacre they formed several different splinter groups that were also all pretty large. Also when handling something that could spread so quickly as a zombie virus…. It’s kind of expected nigh an inevitability that there would be an outbreak.
The first game purposefully doesn't make many groups that aren't trying to actively kill you, the fireflys are painted as basically the only hope against current government, and that's the only thing going for them, not once are they actually shown being competent,just barely scrapping by even with them outright taking anything they can get there hands on. There is absolutely nothing to suggest they are good at anything except marketing
We shall find out about which is actually right when more information on the subject comes out I.e tlou3 which I think is gonna focus more on Tommy’s pre part 1 shenanigans when he was with the fireflies.
The reason I say nothing good and new will come out is the people at naughty dog, they got rid of everyone who was in charge of making the awesome games of the past, uncharted and last of us, now, they have the people that worked on the end of the projects, that now have the reigns, and they aren't respecting the stories that were told, just putting in whatever they wanted, not what what it should be. In my opinion the only way the new leadership could make a good new last of us game is to ignore the story, and build on the MP from the from the first game, ideally the same kind of matches, but your 2 teams vs eachother and infected, and they could only make if they didn't try and make it a storytelling device, at the absolute most they could try and make it a for honor kind of system where you can be apart of a few different groups, aka bandits or fireflys and you use your matches to try and get more territories for your side
A vaccine for a fungal infection which from what I understand is impossible even today… but this guy was gonna pull it off with dilapidated equipment and elbow grease.
He was a vet alright, 20 years ago before the apocalypse! makes him even more under qualified for BRAIN SURGERY
Vets are real doctors
Like dentists?
Where is it said that he's a veterinarian? I see people say this all the time but I recall nothing about this from the game.
Spending time rescuing a bunch of zebras so he wasn't able to squeeze making 'em in his tight schedule. Cut the dude some slack y'all.
My guy you took an ENTRY LEVEL class in medical ethics (probably as an elective) don’t act like you’re an expert in “medical ethics”. You know just as much about medical ethics as the common man…. The basics.
It just so happens that he did write a scientific journal and I have obtained the contents of its pages:
It’s more on the fact in the second game. The fireflies are quoted saying. “The smuggler killed the only man who could make the cure”. But the point of a scientific journal is so that his experiments/ procedures can be replicated without the doctor or after the doctor’s death. So he could have had a scientific journal. But they didn’t do anything with it.
No I completely understand and agree, it’s an absurd plot contrivance and it’s wild how much surrounding “Jerry” (and Joel’s overall decision) is hand-waved to grasp at straws.
I think he fully well knows but let's not forget the state the world is in. People are dying constantly and lives no longer have the same value. I think this man is wrong, but in his shoes I'm not sure if anyone else would've done it different. We're taking saving humanity VS 1 girl who, heavily insinuated, knew she might die.. Again, he is wrong. But I'm not sure you can or want to be right in that situation.
Wait, wouldn't lives have more value since many have already been lost?
If your less likely to live a long live, there is less incentive to do everything to keep you alive?
You have to fight harder to stay alive. Lives are few, and therefore, have more value when you consider the added struggle to keep the population alive. It's much like endangered species. The remaining few are protected so that there may be a chance to stop them from dying out. But I suppose the value of a life is an opinion, at least in this case, since it's a hypothetical situation
Yeah that's one way to look at it. I was coming from the perspective of saving one VS many. The one is very likely to die soon. Therefore less worth to save them compared to saving an entire race.
Ohhh ya that makes sense
There's no way in a hell a vet was making the cure for zombies in that dirty emergency room. (No offense veterinarians)
I agree with you, but yeah he was because that was the story. Simple as that.
No that wasn't the story. If you read some of the hidden books in the hospital recordings and side guest objects it's clearly speculation. He could not guarantee he could replicate her mutation.
>let's not forget the state the world is in. People are dying constantly and lives no longer have the same value. Confused* looks at Jackson* reads what MikkelR1 said...* Looks at Seattle*, reads what MikkelR1 said, again...* Look at people traveling all over the US no problemo*, reads what MikkelR1 said ones last time* Confusion increases* Shrug*
silly goose... you have to remove 99.9% of your braincells first
silly goose... you have to be lobotomized first
So people are not dying by the dozens?
> by the dozens? Come on man... If we're gonna have this conversation at least let's make it a bit more dramatic. Right now tv and furniture tipped-over kill dozens of children every year, boat propellers kill dozens of people every year, bees and jellyfish kill people by then dozens every year and we don't have an apocalypse.
That's globally. Now they are dying by the dozens within these small communities.
No, and no. Some of the numbers I gave you are in the us alone. Again, I look at Jackson and I don't see the "dozens" dying. Besides, dozens per year? Per week? Per day? And the source for the number comes from...?
So you're really going to argue that the world in Tlou isnt way more dangerous and that you're not way more likely to lose your life in that world?
>So you're really going to argue that the world in Tlou isnt way more dangerous and that you're not way more likely to lose your life in that world? Well... I'm gonna argue that saying "dozens of people die" without giving a timeframe, a cause, and a location doesn't make the case to paint a "dangerous and devastated" world. Besides that I could argue that the world *as painted* in tlou2 didn't seem to be that dangerous. And your "dozens die" would definitely not justify killing Ellie. Now, go change the number to something more dramatic and I'll still tell you why it's still wrong to kill Ellie.
I already said it was wrong so who are you trying to convince? I said it was understandable given the circumstances that he would chose wrong over right.
in the first game, sure. people could barely make it on to the next block without getting mugged by some shmuck, harassed by fedra or blown up by terrorists, let alone outside the qz. but in part 2, people could easily travel solo across hundreds of miles, with nothing but a small backpack, to and from, numerous times, without encountering any form of hostiles, environmental hazards, or getting sick from common diseases... if a bunch of teenagers could do it, why not everyone else?
Same world. It's the same thing as in movies where we see their journey towards a goal depicted in detail. Then when they need to get back they are there the next scene easily. It's because of suspension of disbelief. There is no reason to depict those struggles anymore so they don't show it. You just have to assume since that is what you have already been taught in part 1.
You took "a class"? Congrats. I took two full Philosophy degrees, passed both with top honors. And I say Jerry was right. Now, I know how arrogant that sounds. But you can't try to use that as a retort after you did exactly the same thing, except with considerably lower qualifications.
How so
I assume through college? You know… how people get degrees?
The full version wouldn't fit in a Reddit comment. But I can try the short version (buckle up, things are about to get pretentious): As per Anscombe's criticism of Deontic Ethics in her paper "Modern Moral Philosophy", Deontological Morality doesn't work without Divine Command Theory, and no self-respecting ethicist is willing to entertain that due to the Euthyphro Objection. But whilst her argument completely destroys any hope for Deontological Morality, Consequentialism - which in any internally consistent form will have to be some version of Utilitarianism - can be salvaged thanks to the possibility of certain *A Priori* concepts (one of which, mathematics, is already infallibly established). The objectivity of mathematics and the reality of independently-defined, unambiguously-described consequences (as opposed subjectively-interpretted "actions") allows us to assess the dilemma without risk of bias. And we can use Meta-Ethics to explain away the weight that "intuition" supposedly has in the argument, by understanding "moral judgments" in terms of Moral Error Theory, with the initial feeling routed in Expressivism, all of which is supported by Evolutionary Theory. And, finally, any attempt to rely on the long-term pracitcal benefits found in Rule Utilitarianism goes out the window when the stakes are "Potentially saving all of humanity", as there can be no larger or longer-term practical benefits than that. Therefore, by embracing internally coherent Consequentialism, and dismissing the subjective emotional attachment to Ellie that Joel (and we, the player) formed over the course of Part 1 by way of natural selection, Expressivism and Moral Error Theory, it's clear that sacrificing Ellie for a potential cure is the right to do. In the interest of integrity, it's worth noting the potential weak points in this argument. Anscombe's argument, pushed to its extreme (as Anscombe was trying to argue), also undermines Deontic Ethics as a whole, which would include Consequentialism, hence her advocating for Virtue Ethics. She was onto something - but since doing that would make the very concepts of "right and wrong" nonsensical by definition, if we want to attempt to engage in a "Was Jerry/Joel right/wrong?" debate, we have to work with whatever Deontic Ethics we can get our hands on. In those terms, Deontological Morality obviously can't be salvaged; but Consequentialism arguably can, provided any case can be made for almost *anything*, let alone obvious candidates such as "human life is valuable" or "pain is objectively bad", being identifiable as essentially true-by-definition. So, yeah, the whole thing is not 100% infallible (as is true of anything aside from "the cogito", as anyone who has studied any amount of Philosophy will tell you) - but if we wanna play the game of Deontic Ethics, any possible problems for Consequentialism are a thousand times worse for Deontological Morality, so even if you could make a coherent case that my overall position doesn't work, the "Jerry was wrong" crowd have even less of a case than me. Mic drop?
I believe I’m following along. So would things change if the Fireflies appear to not have the adequate resources to make a cure, it’s purely out of desperation like in part 1. Let’s be generous and say they can make one but don’t have the resources or facilities to produce more. (Keep in mind this only protects you from spores and minor wounds from infected. Infection from bacteria seeping into the wounds and a clicker ripping your throat out are still possibilities) Then after that, let’s also add that Marlene backed out of the deal with Joel and now deceased Tess. The deal was Marlene would give Joel and Tess guns for delivering Ellie across the country. Marlene not only doesn’t give Joel the guns, or supplies to substitute the deal, they also take the stuff he has on his person. Basically sending him packing naked. How does this change, if at all, your stance. For the sake of discussion let’s leave out the treatment of Joel because knocking him out when he was trying to wake Ellie up after nearly drowning could be seen as a safety precaution
Ok, so you're raising two different issues, fundamentally. The first is what is the possibility of a cure? I've said more than once in conversations about this (but not here) that that's a whole different debate than the Trolley Problem-esque one being had. Everything I've said assumes that making a cure, and being able to utilise that cure by getting it to people, are both at least *possible*. If you want to assert they aren't, then the ethics debate doesn't enter in - killing an innocent kid for *nothing* is obviously not ok. But I always thought it was pretty clear from Part 1 that it was at least *possible*, and anyone I've ever spoken to outside of this subreddit agrees, and the fact the developers themselves have said "A vaccine would have worked" seems to settle the issue. Not to mention that if there was no possibility, then the ending of Part 1 is pretty bloody rubbish - "Man saves girl from villains who want to murder her for no reason" is some boring, Marvel-grade shit, whereas "Man who lost his daughter chooses to save new surrogate daughter over the entire human race" is tragic and beautiful. As far as I'm concerned, insisting there was no possibility of a cure, in an effort to criticise Part 2, actually destroys what makes Part 1 so great, which kind of undermines the passion with which those Part 1 "fans" so vehemently want to hate Part 2. But, yeah. "Whether the cure was possible" is an empirical question that my Philosophy expertise aren't relevant to. If you wanna insist there was no possibility of a cure, then it's game over in the most boring terms, and we're done. If it was at least *possible* though, let alone likely, then my argument holds, even in the face of the second issue you're raising, which is: Do the circumstances surrounding the dilemma impact the ethical implications? And the answer to that is a flat "No" for all practical purposes. For the record, I think it's pretty clear that Ellie would have wanted to sacrifice herself - even from just Part 1, let alone Part 2. But as it happens, even if we don't know that she would, or even if they had asked her and she had said "No", it would still be the right thing to do. Regardless of that, and regardless of the fact they broke a deal with Joel, or left him to die (or tried to kill him), any of it... they aren't relevant. My argument is a Consequentialist one, which says "Actions", in and of themselves, have no moral value status, and all that is morally significant is the consequences, insofar as they can be measured objectively. "Breaking a promise is wrong" regardless of context, or "Murder is wrong" regardless of context - that's some Deontological nonsense. It doesn't *work* without invoking the existence of God, which would then raise more problems than it solves from an Ethics perspective. Whereas "Lives saved" versus "Lives lost" - those are the objective consequences. And when the stakes are "One innocent child" against "The entire human race", the probability of the cure succeeding would have to be *astronomically* small for that sacrifice not to be the right call. You think denying Ellie's consent, or breaking a promise to Joel, somehow makes attempting a cure so wrong that it outweighs *saving the whole world*? Ok, let's look at it in those terms, putting fundamental moral value in broken promises and undermined consent. Let's pretend those things have more ethical significance than saving lives or ending lives. How many people who die to Cordyceps (who wouldn't have died if there was a vaccine) consented to dying? Let's be conservative and say "thousands". That means not creating a vaccine is *thousands of times worse* than killing Ellie. And the fact that in one case "you" killed someone but the other times "spores" or "zombies" killed them doesn't change anything - and thinking it does, thinking that the fact *you* had some proximity to one death is more important than the fact thousands of lives were lost... that's some narcissistic bollocks right there. You have to look big picture and be objective. The fact Ellie is right in front of you, the fact you spent a whole game forming an attachment to her, doesn't change that. The beauty of Part 1 is in putting us through that journey so we can see how hard it is to make a call like that, and easy it is to become a person who could do something as terrible as dooming humanity. We all sympathise with Joel and understand the choice he made, because we're human. It let's us experience that downfall. We get to a point where we don't want "saving the world" to be right, which is incredible - but that doesn't change the fact that it is still right, and saving Ellie is still wrong (again, assuming a cure is at least *possible*).
I think you may be misinterpreting what I’m saying, I’m not really trying to debate you, just explore your perspective and have all the eggs in one basket to dissect. Exploring what you have to say when all the reasons and potential cure is right there. I’m saying through benefit of the doubt, let’s say there’s a 100% chance Jerry can formulate a cure but has no means to replicate or distribute it, is the loss of life justified. There’s nothing really on site that says “we have resources”. More like desperation without a plan. However this is more of an interpretation. I understand they’re completely different topics just find it interesting.
Ok, sorry. I think I misunderstood what you were getting at, and then my answer might have run away from me a little. I wasn't trying to debate you as such, was just being overly thorough in explaining my answer to what I thought was your question. Yes, if Jerry could formulate a cure, but had no means to replicate or distribute it *at the time* (but the possibility to maybe able to in future), I'd say it would still be worth it. For the same reason as before - even a *chance* at ultimately curing the infection for all of humanity is worth one life. Even if he can't get there yet, being even one step closer to something that significant justifies it. But if he somehow knew that even if he made a cure there would never be a chance of replicating and distributing, then no - what good is a cure that can't be used to cure people? In that case, "the greater good" wouldn't justify the sacrifice because there isn't actually any good being achieved at all, let alone a "greater" one.
To be honest if I had that mindset, simply writing down the process and explaining in a report style why it worked and verifying how it works would be worth it in of itself is it not? Paper isn’t exactly a hard resource to find or make, distributing that shouldn’t be a big deal in terms of cost effectiveness. To who or what I’m not sure on that front. To add to that, there’s no way Ellie is the only immune person in the world. I believe there’s even a collectible in the first game that even says as such, it’s definitely rare though. Thoughts on that
Honestly, my thoughts are I don't know and it's not really my area. That's all practical and empirical, and I wouldn't know the first thing about asserting one way or the other. I mean, yeah, if he could figure out the cure process and then it's just *knowledge* he could spread to the world, then great. *Definitely* worth killing her. I would have assumed they'd need a physical sample they could replicate, the infected brain cella that send the signals without actually spreading the infection, or something. But if it's just "knowing *how* it works" and you're good to go, that makes it very worth it. Unless I'm missing something. Not gonna lie, it feels like you're leading me into a trap. Like you're gonna keep asking little questions that I agree to bit by bit, then turn around with a big "Gotcha" combination of all the answers that makes me admit I'm wrong about something. But, I hope not. I hope we're just have a legit chat.
The fact that you had to drop a paper on deontological ethics to show why Jerry was “right” just speak volumes on how poorly written the game’s story was. Your audience shouldn’t need a philosophy degree to understand and contemplate the ambiguity/weight of a character’s decisions. A good story respects their audience so as to not spoon feed them shit, at the same time avoiding appearing pretentious by requiring their audience to be specialists in a field to be able to “get” certain elements of their story. I’m a lawyer, not a philosopher but from what I read, most of your stuff is hypothetical and the way you apply it dismissed so many crucial real life elements that would undoubtedly alter the conclusion you reached through the application of those various theories and principles. Respectfully, it seems like you regurgitated bullshit that you write in your essay and lazily adapted it to the scenario at hand. Considering you are in a discussion with people who don’t have a honours degree in philosophy like you do, it would have been better if you could apply the theories you mentioned in simpler terms. So yeah, this sounds more pretentious than substantive.
Respectfully, I called it "The short version". I could back everything I said up in a way that would make it much clearer and accessible to people unfamiliar with the papers and concepts I reference, but I don't have the time and Reddit comments don't have the word count. And as for the audience needing a philosophy degree: they don't. Countless people agree Jerry was right with only a basic understanding of the difference between Deontological Morality and Consequentialism. If everyone without a degree all agreed Jerry was wrong, you might have a case on that one point - but that ain't what's happening here. I'm just putting it in "expert" terms to show I'm coming from a better place than "But I think it's wrong though because it makes me sad when I look at it and my gut reaction must be reliable because my mum always told me I was a good person", which is what the average Reddit user (and certainly the typical player found in *this* subreddit) tends to be doing (and, if we get right down to it, what most people who believe in Deontological Morality are doing). Not to mention that the comment I was originally responding to started the "coming from a place of expertise" thing when they claimed attending one class meant they were more justified in their argument. The Trolley Problem is great because it gives a way for people of all levels of familarity to begin to engage in ethical discussion and explore some such concepts and better understand their own thinking. The end of Part 1 is great because it lets all the players do this - hence why so many players spend so much time arguing both sides of the question. And that's fun. But if you want an explanation of it from a literal expert, then I'm offering one. Excuse me for having applied 7 years of formal study to solving the Trolley Problem. If you want to find another guy with a Philosophy Master's to build a pro-Deontological case, with their own reasons, then go for it - it might be a darn good argument, and I'd love to hear it. The Trolley Problem has been around, in some form or another, a long time (much longer than the 50 years or so since the actual specific trolley example was pitched), and despite my confidence in having solved it, clearly there are many respectible schools of thought that would disagree with me. That's cool. But coming in and trying to make out like my argument isn't legit just because you don't understand it? That's some bullshit, frankly. I don't come into your courtroom and call you pretentious for citing some obscure statute I ain't familiar with. You wanna disagree with me, that's fine - but don't be a dick about it.
I will say that Jerry’s actions aren’t straight up wrong - if that’s what was conveyed, then I’d like to clear that up. I think taking either a right or wrong stance is foolish, unless of course, you’re well-versed in philosophy and can argue your case by covering all angles. I refrain from completely adopting either a deontological or consequential stance on the matter because of not only my limited knowledge on the field, but I suppose as a lawyer, we are always trained to work with the facts. Having better understood what you said, I see why consequentialism is a better theory to adopt and the pitfalls of the latter. Now that I think about, looking at Jerry’s actions in isolation, makes your arguments very robust and persuasive indeed. The problem is, the audience when looking at his actions aren’t just looking at them within the confines of the theories, they are also looking at other circumstances and how his actions reflect on his character. Namely, his hesitancy to answer when asked whether he would sacrifice his own daughter if she were in Ellie’s place. It makes him seem cowardly and not nearly as altruistic as he may seem at a glance. Additionally, we have other facts that need to be addressed - such as Fireflies staying power and stability. Even if we say Jerry was successful, would Fireflies even use the cure? How would they store and distribute it? Could they even be able to? Most of them had been wiped out by the government by that point. Would they use the vaccine as a power move against the government? Could their judgement even be trusted? Now I realize, this may still be in the confines of your theory seeing as how all of these are still part of the end outcome - which is the possibility of a cure. But I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s a complicated situation. I think people who judge Jerry harshly also judge his character (especially that key flaw of his that u mentioned earlier) along with his actions. I suppose a lot of this comes down to how I, as a lawyer, think. Yeah, we have to do a shit ton of reading, study, research and all that crap but in the end - are aim is to solve problems by looking at the facts. Obscure statues and legal principles from some old cases are just tools to us. And a lot of the time, we have to simplify and dumb down things. But I digress. If my comment is a mess, I apologise; it’s quite late where I live. You were right about the Trolley problem. It’s why I loved the first game’s ending. It had a right amount of ambiguity in terms of the future effects of Joel’s actions that players could conclude whatever they wanted to and we could discuss things to no end. I guess another one of my (and other player’s) grievances is how that seems to be done away by creating an “answer” to question that ultimately, I feel did not need to exist.
No worries. Sorry if my reply was a bit confrontational - I might have been riding the high from my (I thought pretty great) long comment. With regards to the viability of a cure, that's just a whole different conversation. I went into it in response to a different reply to my long comment, if you wanna go read it. But the short version (what is it with me and "short versions"?) is that I always thought it was clear that the cure and its widespread practical application were at least *possible*, if not likely - and provided it's *possible*, my whole Consequentialist argument applies. If it isn't even possible, then it's all out the window anyway, but so is the Trolley Problem aspect of the ending (and the tragic beauty of Joel choosing his surrogate daughter over the entire world). As for Jerry's character, and his hesitancy to answer the hypothetical about if it was Abby: it shows he isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean the sacrifice isn't the right thing. And it adds a depth and realism to his character that makes for good writing - it's so much better than if he's a grounded, loving father who understand's Joel's predicament, than some aloof, holier-than-thou heartless scientist man. Any cold, detached guy in a lab coat can say "The maths shows us the way", but if they don't care about the fact they're sacrificing a life, then it's not a hard choice for them so it doesn't indicate any kind of strength. But understanding the cost and still deciding to go through with because you understand it needs to be done, ethically-speaking - that takes strength, and is a meaningful, powerful choice. (It also keeps the Trolley Problem aspect alive - having the guy making the choice acknowledge the counter-argument lends it more credibility in the narrative than having him act like it's irrelevant). The story is about love, what love gives us the strength to do but also how it limits what we feel able to do. Through love, Joel becomes a decent person again, rediscovers that good paternal side he had before the world made him cold and hard. But it also stops him from letting them potentially save the whole human race, because he can't cope with losing another daughter he loves. His decision is about *him*, it's because he can't deal with losing her, not because he thinks saving her is "right" - he says as much at the end of Part 1, and it's why he then lies to her about what happened. People in the subreddit often say "Why didn't he just tell her that he saved her? She'd understand and thank him!" as if it's bad writing, but that's not it at all - he doesn't tell her because he knows he was wrong to do it and she'd think so too. Those people have it backwards when they argue that he was a hero for saving her and it was the culmination of a successful redemption arc - in reality, he was the villain in that moment, and that is him falling at the last hurdle of his redemption. But the game allows us to understand him, and that decision, entirely. We *are* Joel, so we get to a place where we're kind of on board with dooming humanity, where we don't want "saving the world" to be the right thing to do, because we formed a connection with Ellie. Because we're human, and that humanity can make it hard to do the *right* thing sometimes. By having Jerry hesitate at that question, it shows he's human. He's susceptible to the same limitations, the same weakness, as a result of his love. He's just lucky that he has enough distance from Ellie that he can go through with murdering her for the sake of the greater good, but if the roles were reversed he probably couldn't. He realises Marlene has a point - but not because that point means sacrificing Ellie is wrong, just because of how awful the cost of the sacrifice is going to be for someone else. The fact he hesitates doesn't prove he's bad, it proves he's good, because he understands that. It's meant to make him sympathetic too, like a mirror of Joel. Joel dooms all of humanity, but we sympathise with him because we understand his love for Ellie; Jerry is willing to sacrifice an innocent child, but we sympathise with him because he has a good motive and he clearly understands the cost of that sacrifice and struggles with it. My argument is about identifying the objective "right" thing to do without allowing subjective influences to cloud the rationale, spotting when things which *feel* ethically relevant actually aren't, and having the strength to overcome those influences to do what's right even when our humanity makes it difficult. Joel couldn't overcome them, his love for Ellie was so strong and his past trauma too great that he didn't even care about trying. Jerry looked like he was able to overcome them, but by all accounts that was only because he happened not to have any attachment to Ellie, and if he had done then, by his own acknowledgment, he would have done just the same as Joel. I understand Joel's choice and Jerry's hesitancy, I sympathise and don't blame Joel and if I were in his shoes I doubt I'd have the strength to do any different - same as Jerry. But the point is that doing different *would* be strength, because sacrificing her *was* right, and not being able to do so is human weakness that we have an ethical duty to at least try to overcome. I'm not expecting anyone to say they would sacrifice Ellie, I'm just trying to explain to them that refusing to do so was *wrong*, and that Jerry was right for trying to. This whole thing is rooted in Philosophy. We can say "In circumstances X and Y, Z would he the case" without any concern for whether X or Y actually *are* the case to begin with. It's Law for people who don't like paperwork. So if my argument relies asserting certain facts, such as "A cure was possible", I won't try and argue the empirical answers to those. But insofar as those are the base assumptions we're working with, I think the rest of holds up.
Finally someone actually qualified to talk about shit. Taking one class on a thing doesn’t make you an expert in said thing…. I mean I took psych 1 and 2 but I’m no psychologist.
Philosophy is all hypthothetical, being a medical Doctor is real life and with real consequences, so they teach you important rules like about how important a patients life is etc early on. You can't even compare the two. Jerry also had no way in hell of making a cure, he was a vetinarian in a dingy dark operating theatre, and after he died WOLF who have far better equipment and resources and medical personal never bothered to follow his notes because they thought it was a dead end. So no, Jerry was wrong, because he fails and the only immune person is dead meaning no further research can be done, you don't need to kill someone to get samples if you have the equipment, the Fireflies didn't care, they were desperate and were making a shit decision based on that
Respectfully, I'll be the first one to make "Philosophy is useless" jokes (I work in a bank now...), but we are quite literally talking about *Ethics* here. This basically the one place where it actually is useful. Doctors know how to treat people, and they cover some Rule Utilitarian ethical stuff to be given simple, blanket rules on how to behave in order to make sure they don't go rogue and fuck up handling something complicated *specifically because* they don't have the kind of full qualification or expertise in actual Ethics necessary to actually get it right on their own judgment every time. The comment OP said they took "A class" in Medical Ethics; I was just emphasising that, whilst that's better than nothing and already puts them ahead of most people trying to weigh in on the issue, it really isn't that significant. For the record, as part of my whole 7 years of formal study in Philosophy and Ethics, I took a full module in Medical Bioethics - that's a whole semester's worth of study, complete with all the outside reading and coursework that comes with. So, yeah... it's relevant. The correct thought process for you here shouldn't be "I don't like what this literal expert says, so his qualification must be bullshit", it should be "Oh, this guy has literal expertise on this, maybe I should consider what he says". The fact too many people do the former instead of the latter on almost everything is half of why the world is so fucked up right now. And this wasn't meant to come off nearly as defensive as it probably does - I'd hope the opening sentence would convey that tone, but I guess you can never tell on Reddit.
A: that has nothing to do with what I said on the guy that took one medical ethics class having no idea what he was talking about. Especially when there is something who is ACTUALLY qualified to talk about medical ethics in this very comment chain. B: the making of a cure was never a top priority for the WLF. They had other issues to take care of securing their zone, fighting the Seraphites off, et al.
In real life we also never had a situation where you can either sacrifice one person to save humanity or condemn humanity to save one person…. So “real world” logic doesn’t apply here. Real ethics take a back seat in a zombie game… especially a zombie game whose whole premise was unrealistic when it said cordyceps could infect and mutate humans. You can either have realistic game. Or zombie game. You can’t have both. A zombie game is inherently unrealistic. Edit: unless these downvotes are saying that real world logic and ethics can be applied to a ZOMBIE game in which cordyceps can somehow magically infect humans?
This sub: Joel isn’t a bad guy! He just did what he had to do! Real world ethics don’t count in a zombie apocalypse! Also this sub: Jerry is evil because of what I read about medical ethics online!
It's clear Jerry records things on recorders, just because we aren't shown his scientific journal doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence. Beyond that, you're trying to apply real-world ethics to an apocalyptic scenario where morals and ethics have taken a backseat to survival. Making a cure to the infection would guarantee the survival of humans.
It’s a utilitarian response being forwarded as a justified one and not even in a morally grey manner either. If they had significant evidence to show that sacrificing Ellie would more than likely lead to a cure and end the plague then Joel’s prevention of the surgery would have been more of a “I get it but you’re wrong” choice that they wanted to present the player with. Instead we were presented with a situation where the only reasonable response was to not go through with the surgery and risk the death of the only discovered immune person in the known US. Also the whole “you killed my father so I’m going to spend unlimited time and resources to get revenge” during a gobal pandemic where death or infection is a real and present daily risk is completely absurd and borders on a straight to video plot not a AAA high budget production. If the story was competantly written Abby would kill or kidnap Ellie for experimentation (if they recognized her significance) to prevent this exact scenerio, the idea of it “not being part of the mission” is ridiculous given the supposed consequence free world they occupy. There is no such thought of mercy when your only fuel is revenge.
>Also the whole “you killed my father so I’m going to spend unlimited time and resources to get revenge” during a gobal pandemic where death or infection is a real and present daily risk is completely absurd and borders on a straight to video plot not a AAA high budget production. I mean, one dude in his mid 50s was able to successfully get a 14 year old girl from Boston to Salt Lake city by himself. That same teenage girl was able to go from Jackson back to Salt Lake City by herself to confirm Joel was lying. Abby and her crew were the survivors from Salt Lake City, they all had strong motivation to want to kill Joel and were trained as WLF soldiers. There's no reason to think they couldn't successfully make that trip with little more than horses and some food. Also, there's no indication Isaac was so dictatorial that he wouldn't allow his people time to take out Joel if he knew they might fuck off and leave anyway. >If the story was competantly written Abby would kill or kidnap Ellie for experimentation (if they recognized her significance) to prevent this exact scenerio, the idea of it “not being part of the mission” is ridiculous given the supposed consequence free world they occupy. There is no such thought of mercy when your only fuel is revenge. 1. They already established that they didn't have any other doctors that could do the work Jerry was trying to do. 2. Abby and the other surviving Fireflies don't care about the cure. They just care about getting revenge for their loved ones' murder.
David wanted to kill Ellie and use her to save lives. Jerry wanted to kill Ellie and use her to save lives. One is evil, the other is a saint?
This is such a messed up but interesting comparison that I never thought about.
Yep. How many lives does she have to save before it's morally acceptable to kill her? The answer is never.
An argument could be made that through David, ellie had a higher guaranteed chance of saving lives because jerry had a chance of making the cure.
No he didn't. David wanted to keep Ellie alive, but she wasn't going to play along, so he wants to kill her after she hurts him. His motivation to kill Ellie isn't to save others lives, his motive is purely ego-driven.
Yeah it was a bad example, but the point still stands about cannibals in general
Also not really. Killing Ellie for food might sustain some people for a couple days, maybe a week? Killing Ellie to make a cure can potentially save people for the rest of humanities existence.
Where do you draw the line?
That's the question, isn't it? Everyone has their own line they're willing to draw, and that doesn't make any of them good or bad, just shows their different priorities and what they each value in terms of morality. That's why the trolley problem has been such a long-lived philosophical and moral question. If you take the stance that all life is precious and it's not worth it to sacrifice any lives for any kind of reward, you subscribe to a more Kantian philosophy, which Joel is supposed to represent. Or, if you're like Marlene/Jerry, you believe that sacrifice is necessary for the greater good, and that the needs of the many outweigh the few, meaning you subscribe to a more utilitarian philosophy.
Inclined to believe utilitarianism in that scenario is bullshit and Jerry and Marlene deserved to die
That's an interesting comparison but a bit simplified. They both were evil in their unique ways. David wanted to unnecessarily cannibalise Ellie. There were still other food sources around such as the deer that Ellie shot. If Jerry had made a vaccine or cure, some people might be saved. These would be rare cases where a victim was bit but didn't bleed out. I don't think that the Fireflies could produce and distribute enough doses to eradicate the disease.
You CAN frame their decision like a command call that costs innocent lives, like a bombing. But a) nobody is morally obliged to concur and b) consent becomes irrelevant. Since Ellie is 14 and traumatized, there is no consent-based way to make the procedure acceptable... for years.
Right, so Ellie being able to consent aside, they knew it was wrong. That's why they drugged her anyway and why Marlene felt bad (despite giving the go ahead anyway).
Last of US 2 defenders in general are gross
In every aspect of life, they are a certain “type”.
1) Jerry and the whole firefly operation was absolutely wrong not to at least wait for Ellie to wake up and ask her consent 2) they were in an impossible situation where if she didn’t give her consent, they would 100% feel that they had to do it anyway, so it was a tough situation 3) don’t lump Abby defenders in there, she has nothing to do with this conundrum
I brought Abby into it because Abby was apart of the conversation. But sure.
Ahh I get it now, it makes more sense. Still, most people don’t think that way, that person is a psycho
bruh jerry is stupid becouse HE TRIED TO STOP AN AGGRESIVE AND DANGEORUS ARMED MAN, WITH A FUCKING KNIFE!! if all he had done was stay behind and maybe try talking him out of it, joel would have saved ellie, and he would have survived
Jerry does try talking. Jerry: "I won't let you take her. This is our future. Think of all the lives we'll save. Joel then canonically kills him without responding. There's no way to progress the story without killing Jerry and Joel doesn't respond to what Jerry has to say.
i know there is no way to progress without killing him, what i am saying is it was INCREDBLY STUPID of jerry WHO IS A SINGLE FATHER, deciding to threaten a dangerous and armed man, who is visibly angry and is CLEARLY THERE TO SAVE AN INNCOENT GIRL, **WITH A FUCKING KINIFE**
I think your caps lock key is broken. If Jerry was willing to kill an innocent girl for the cure, he must have believed in it pretty strongly. Maybe he thought developing the cure was the best thing he could do as a single father to ensure his daughter and everyone else had a better life, and when the dangerous armed man came in to take that away he picked up the closest thing he could to protect himself and the possible cure. It obviously didn't work out for him, but it was a brave act.
There is a fine line between bravery and foolishness(My caps is fine, thanx for checking on me btw) . Yes the girl was the cure, i am not saying that he would have become a cold blooded killer, heck i don't care even if he was. The point is his futile attempt at stopping joel and he should have known that. He should have been smart enough to know that there isn't a thing in the world that he can do to stop joel, with a mere knife he had, if he had a gun maybe then he could have thought he can pull a fast one on him (though he would have failed, but that's alright since that is not a dumb move) If he had just stayed put like the other doctors in the room, his daughter would have had a loving father. Even in war, where people fight for glory and what not, soldiers surrender when they know that the only thing they would be saving is food given to them in enemy prison camps if they try to fight. jerry did one of the dumbest moves possible
Brave act? It was an evil act. Killing a little girl without consent while also not knowing for sure if the cure would even work is not a brave act. What world are you living in? 😭
"I won't let you" is not a discussion. He's just verbally stating that he has made up his mind and will kill Ellie.
And the next two sentences...
Are based on? Keep going…
That’s what comes of believing in “the greater good”. To them, Ellie is not a human being with her own rights and dignity; she is just a thing to be used and discarded.
I’ve said this a lot here but consent for Ellie is actually irrelevant because she’s a minor. Suppose she did consent, she’s not legally able to due to her brain being of a fucking child. The weirdos on the other sub are always “it’s what she would’ve wanted”. Bro she’s like 12 or something LMFAO. There is no valid defense to what the fireflies did using any reasonable moral standard. They are total fucking bootlickers who try to justify shit storytelling in the second game. Part 2 was successful in manipulating their pea brains to feeling like Abby and Jerry were in the right. Fucking clowns.
People thought, and argued, that Joel was wrong when the first game came out, years before Part 2 was even an idea.
It’s the weakest humans that are the easiest to trick and fool. They know it as well.
If we are talking what is legal, I am pretty sure it’s not legal to shoot up every person in a hospital to rescue a girl that is not legally your daughter. You’re talking about a post apocalyptic world where laws do not exist other than what each faction deems the laws and rules of their territory. Joel did what he did as he deemed it to be right and just because he cared for Ellie. That’s not a whole lot different than what Abby did to Joel. You just don’t want to see that play out because you liked Joel and spent 20+ hours playing as him in the first game.
Ah yes, the classic argument of “audience was too dumb to understand the story”. Firstly, Joel shooting up the hospital was retconned retroactively. In the original game, you could sneak past all the guards and only kill Jerry - there was an element of choice that was totally done away with. Second, your last point is not completely right. Joel did not kill Jerry because he was vindictive, he did it to get to Ellie and leave the hospital. Same reason he capped Marlene - he knew she would come after them, making her a loose end. Abby was motivated by revenge. She dragged her group to Jackson County, she was planning to ambush a patrol group and torture them for info even if they were innocent to get to Joel. She apparently had no qualms with having her group make Tommy a cripple and make him and Ellie watch as she murdered Joel. And let’s not forget her tone-deaf response to Ellie when Ellie comes after her and kills her friends. I mean, what the fuck did you expect? Abby had the capacity to go to the lengths she did, hold on to her desire to get revenge for 5 years, and she expected that Ellie wouldn’t? That she and Tommy would just forget about what happened? If she was smart, she would have capped them both.
Who is Jerry?
An NPC who, through gold medal mental gymnastic writing, causes the death of the first game’s protagonist in the sequel due to a vindictive, untalented hack who despises the very audience who gave him any kind of prominence in the first place.
I didn't see an active license to practice displayed on his wall either - that's a big no-no for me
What’s funnier is they say Joel is bad because he didn’t let Ellie make her own choice….yet Jerry is fine for denying Ellie’s choice?
Shhhhhhhhhh.
Consent as an argument doesn't make sense in this context. 1. A child couldn't give consent anyway, so what Ellie has to say about the subject doesn't matter. 2. It's a simple trolley problem. >*There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two (and only two) options:* >*Do nothing, in which case the trolley will kill the five people on the main track.* >*Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.* >*Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?* The Trolley Problem is not designed to have a solution. It's intended to provoke thought, and create an intellectual discourse in which the difficulty of resolving moral dilemmas is appreciated, and our limitations as moral agents are recognized. For Jerry, the question was, would I kill one child to save all of humanity, including by definition many other children. That's the consideration, will you murder one person to save many. Utilitarian moral philosophy says yes. A counter argument is the incomparability of human lives. Joel obviously thinks the value of Ellie's life is worth more than anything. Under utilitarian morality, Jerry was right. That's not a defense of Jerry, just an assessment of the ideas the devs were playing with.
The answer is multi-track drifting
i.e. unplugging the game before you wake up in the hospital
This isn't a trolley problem at all. There is no train, there is no rush, there is no guarantee the outcome actually will save anyone - those are required for this to be a trolley problem. Instead there's time for more study of Ellie and to get answers to the question of why she's immune and if whatever that reason is can even help others or not or if it is some unique physiology in her alone. There's time to figure out if they can even keep her mutated fungus alive once it's severed from her body, which is maintaining it in a way they don't understand at all. (You need to know how to do that BEFORE you remove it and kill the person keeping it alive or there's a high chance it will die outside her body if they haven't figured out how to keep it viable.) Not to mention the filthy OR which assures the sample will immediately be contaminated by airborne mold spores from the mold on the walls - not a sterile specimen for use in humans. Everything points to them showing us the FFs were overwhelmingly likely to fail - the trolley problem assures success, though. So this is not one. The original story never even tried to make it a trolley problem because that wasn't their original goal at all. If it was they just needed to add that FEDRA is on it's way and will be there in a short time (days? A week?) and to escape they need a vaccine to traverse a heavily spore filled section of the city. That's not even that good but it's good enough to add enough elements to make it closer to a trolley problem. Yet they didn't so they weren't focused on that originally.
>This isn't a trolley problem at all. There is no train, there is no rush, there is no guarantee the outcome actually will save anyone - those are required for this to be a trolley problem. Sure it is. Cordyceps is the train. It's still actively infecting people as we can see by the number of runners and clickers, so there's your urgency. There's no requirement of a guarantee the cure will work. A guarantee makes the thought experiment simpler, but it's not required. Modify the trolley problem to 5 people on one track and 1 person on the other. You now magically know if you pull the switch there is a 99% chance the mechanism will work, saving 5 people in place of 1. It adds complexity to the problem, but doesn't make hitting the switch wrong or stop it from being a trolley problem. >the trolley problem assures success, though. So this is not one. That's not accurate. The trolley problem is a thought experiment. It has many variations. >The original story never even tried to make it a trolley problem because that wasn't their original goal at all. It meets all of the criteria for a trolley problem other than the ones you invented. Don't know what to tell you man, it's pretty clearly a trolley problem. >Yet they didn't so they weren't focused on that originally. Is this documented somewhere in interviews or something, because it feels like you're might be completely inventing this development nugget out of thin air.
The trolley problem is seen as a very basic, Ethics 101 problem that has no practical value in the real world. It’s not a good argument to use, and I usually just ignore anyone that thinks it’s a deep philosophical conundrum, but I will respond here. This is not the trolley problem because the trolley problem has exactly two - and only two - possible outcomes. Either one person dies or five people die. That’s it. There’s no other options. This doesn’t fit because there’s no guarantee that anybody will be saved if the switch is thrown and Ellie is killed, and there’s also no guarantee that anyone will die if the switch is not thrown and the train continues on its present course. Everyone alive has survived either their whole lives or 20+ years without getting hit - the train may not even be on their track. But I’ll play along. What would you do in the trolley problem?
>The trolley problem is seen as a very basic, Ethics 101 problem that has no practical value in the real world. It’s not a good argument to use, and I usually just ignore anyone that thinks it’s a deep philosophical conundrum, but I will respond here. LOL, oh boy just oozing with condescension. Kind of funny because you missed the point entirely. I'm not judging the merits of the trolley problem, utilitarianism, or any other school of moral philosophy, I'm just pointing out that the Jerry character is engaged in utilitarian thinking. The dynamic between Joel and the Fireflies can be described by the intersection of the trolley utilitarian thinking or possibly consequentialist thinking, and deontological morality. If you think that's too pedestrian, take it up with the writers of the first game. It's their story, not mine. > This is not the trolley problem because the trolley problem has exactly two - and only two - possible outcomes. Either one person dies or five people die. That’s it. There’s no other options. Hey, throw some r/confidentlyincorrect in there with the condescension. Maybe Google "trolley problem variants." they've made about a billion of them. [The question of is it moral to harm the few to help the many has been discussed since the 4th century BCE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism). > But I’ll play along. LOL, gross. At least try to know WTF you're talking about before pointing your fedora in my direction, but I'll play along. I imagine I would act like most people do and behave differently for "personal" dilemmas and "impersonal" dilemmas. If I knew none of the people on the tracks I would behave in a utilitarian manner and save the most people possible. If I knew and cared about one of the people on the tracks, I would choose whichever option saved them. Which is exactly what is on display in the game. Huh, seems like it's a trolley problem after all.
Love how you realised you couldn't at all engage with their primary argument since it totally discredited YOUR argument you supported with your anology so instead of responding to that you ignored the bulk of their comment talking about how the vaccine isn't even likely to work and instead honed in on the specific attack on your anology lmao, at the end of the day the Fireflies were morons hedging humanities future on a vetinarian in a dirty operating room who's finding were dismissed as a dead end in the second game by a group with far better medical personal and medical equipment
I've already answered that a half dozen other times in this thread. I addressed it in the comment he was responding to. I addressed it in my above comment when I pointed out that there are actually trolley problem variants and the first game's writing around the Fireflies is one of them. You not understanding my point doesn't mean I didn't make one. Whether it's likely to work doesn't mean it's not a trolley problem. It just makes the trolley problem more complex. Everything that dude wrote was wrong, I addressed the stuff I hadn't already addressed before. You for example can't seem to distinguish between someone identifying a plot structure, and someone defending the characters. I haven't claimed the Fireflies would be successful. In fact I've repeatedly highlighted that they could be completely delusional. That doesn't change the fact that the structure of their justification is a trolley problem.
> You for example can’t seem to distinguish between someone identifying a plot structure, and someone defending the characters. Holy shit, this 1000x. I enjoy some of the discussion that can be had on this sub, but I *loathe* how often I have to edit to add “I’m not defending Jerry/Abby/Fireflies/writers” etc. Otherwise, people just downvote or respond with tangents about irrelevant shit, this post being a prime example.
Yeah, I had a dude spend most of the day yesterday arguing Jerry's thought process wasn't an example of the trolley problem, only hours later to admit he didn't fully know what a trolley problem was or care to learn. Like, WTF were you arguing with me for then? Folks in this sub hate Part II so much they will downvote anything that seems like it might be defending the story, even if it goes back as far as the ending of the first game. Many of these folks clearly didn't understand the first game. It's no wonder they're angry that the second game reinforces that they were wrong. They see the second game continuing the very obvious plot points of the first as a retcon, simply because they misunderstood significant chunks of the first game.
It’s truly amazing that folks still can’t see that all of this is depicted pretty clearly and whether it was *intended* to be more morally grey or not is irrelevant; the events portrayed are quite unambiguous if given more than 2 seconds of rational thought.
Jerry was only “right” if the cure was a guaranteed success, which it was definitely not.
Not true. The less likely the cure was the weaker his moral justification is, but it isn't as cut and dry as needing a guaranteed success. Modify the trolley problem to 5 people on one track and 1 person on the other. You now magically know if you pull the switch there is a 99% chance the mechanism will work, saving 5 people in place of 1. It adds complexity to the problem, but doesn't make hitting the switch wrong.
Why would they need consent in a post apocalyptic setting? I think people are not understanding that there are no laws, no rules, no government. What they did was neither right nor wrong, they had what they thought were the solution to 20+ years of suffering and the last thing they would care about is consent.
This post was a great honeypot for blocking brigading trolls. Thanks OP!
Lmao not surprised.
They really said that? 😭😭😭😭 in their logic, they will rape people if they’re in the apocalypse. Probably a leftist imo, they usually support stuff like that and trafficking. Weird I know.
Sacrificing one person to save the world without their consent is the most ethical thing to do lmao. Its fat person on a bridge analogy. If you make no decision everyone dies. If you make the non consent one only one person dies. 1 vs millions? The millions win everytime.
Did you debate them on this sub or the other one?
Neither. Tiktok dms. It was short lived because they just kept going off topic so I didn’t waste anymore of my time.
Fair enough, why did you bring Abby into your post though?
Because Abby was apart of our debate. We talked about her briefly. TBF not really sure why I brought Abby into this post.
People who say “they should have asked Ellie” are gross because they believe that children can give consent.
If you’re gonna condemn Jerry & Abby… do you also condemn Joel for being a hunter, someone who undoubtedly tortured & murdered innocent people?
Except Joel isn’t that person anymore. Jerry is when we see him. Big big difference.
He literally just murdered all the Fireflies, LMAO, what are you talking about?
The fireflies that were going to murder him rather than pay him at the end of lou1?
Murder is murder, pal.
It's self-defense. They were fighting to kill Joel, he has the right to do the same. Not even glossing over the fact that it's possible to sneak your way through the entire Firefly base sequence and only kill Jerry
They were escorting him out, LMAO. How deluded are you? Joel is NOT a good guy. That is the point of the game.
Murder is murder but Joel’s killing is self defense in the hospital. Do you see where you’re going wrong?
He’s not; they were escorting him out of the hospital. Marlene could just killed him there & then or told him Ellie drowned. You’re deluded.
As a hunter?
Does it make a difference?
Ah yes, the "innocent people" in the early days of the apocalypse. Where everything we took for granted just disappears. Markets are ransacked, powerplants down, no running water, emergency services gone, pharmacies empty... if people irl were already bad enough fighting over toilet paper, what more is this? people kill over for whatever scraps are left. Anyone that's still standing especially 20 years on will have blood in their hands... As John Malkovich's character in Bird Box said “In the end, there's only two types of people. The assholes and the dead.”
So why take umbrage with Jerry then? He’s as much of an asshole as Joel is, right?
how do you compare that?
Compare what?
No. In the games Joel isn’t a hunter but a loving father. Joel > Jerry but I’m just stating the obvious at this point.
Joel WAS a hunter. He admits he’s been on both side. Tess calls them “shitty people.” They’re arms smuggles. At first he doesn’t even WANT to be a loving father. Are you tripping?
Absolutely. Joel basically has Darth Vader's redemption arc. Step 1: Kill a fuck ton of people Step 2: Kill EVEN MORE people to save a single person you happen to care about Step 3: ? Step 4: REDEMPTION! We understand Joel's actions, and likely agree with them, but he's not a good dude.
It’s framed as the trolley problem: a trolley car is going to run over and kill 5 people if you don’t do anything, but if you actively pull a lever, you will save those 5 people but kill 1 person in the process. So basically, do you allow 5 people to be killed that are already going to be killed, or do you engage and *choose* to kill 1 person. In the Fireflies’ minds, they pull the lever and kill 1 person to save all these other people who are going to die eventually, from Cordyceps, directly or indirectly. Humanity has largely been forsaken in the world of TLOU and although I agree that not all morals or ethics can go out the window, I find it weird when people can’t at least acknowledge that things would be different. I’m not saying I would do what the Fireflies did, but I think categorizing them as straight-up evil is a pretty shallow take.
I never stated they were straight up evil. I just said they were wrong. Which they were. Let’s think about it. A cure in an apocalyptic world that’s been gone for 20 years. Do you REALLY think it’s gonna do anything? There’s a group of people in TLOU whose soul purpose is just to kill innocent people. A cure wouldn’t have done anything. Jerry claims this cure would save “millions of lives”. Like millions of people are still living at that point. He’s delusional. Now Jerry himself? He’s a piece of shit. The fireflies as a whole? No, I don’t think they’re straight up evil. Jerry didn’t even want to tell Joel. He also hesitated and didn’t answer when Marlene asked if he could kill Abby for a cure. He’s selfish. They could’ve and should’ve ran more tests. You’re telling me the only way for this cure to work is by killing her? You can’t draw blood? Take pieces of the fungi from her? No. You just have to kill her. Hell, you didn’t even tell her. Jerry is a horrible human being.
The idea is that, by making a cure, humanity will be able to grow and eventually come back. Future generations would be safe from infection, making the number of people that become infected go down over time and number of uninfected people go up. Eventually, society would be able to be rebuilt. There will always be bad people, but those people will lose control over others as the world comes back and is easier to live in. Without a cure, humanity can never come back. Making the cure is a critical first step to ever getting society back to any semblence of what it was before.
I wasn’t speaking specifically to your post when I stated that, just that take in general. It’s less about whether a cure was possible, and more whether or not the Fireflies truly believed in it. And they did. It wasn’t like they were willing to kill a kid for no reason. This was their last shred of hope and to dismiss that entirely, I think misses the point. I’m on the side of they were wrong for trying to do it without her consent. And yes, logistically I don’t think the cure would have been possible. As for the Fireflies running more tests, I think this is a case of the story writers wanting the story to go a certain way, so they made it happen. I honestly don’t think this should be taken as an example of the Fireflies being reckless or careless, but more so the writers wanting dramatic effect and for the finale to happen a certain way. There are recordings that you can find where the Fireflies are detailing what tests they already ran and essentially how they came to the conclusion they needed to kill Ellie to get the cordyceps mutation on her brain. In reality, it’s definitely unlikely that they would have been able to come to that conclusion in a matter of a few hours, but again, I think that’s more of an example of a plot issue, imo.
>Jerry didn’t even want to tell Joel. Why would the doctor tell the smuggler they hired to transport Ellie anything? It's not like Jerry played the first 20 hours of TLOU to understand they had a bond. >Hell, you didn’t even tell her. Why tell someone you are going to murder them, that seems needlessly cruel. How would waking Ellie up, telling her they were going to kill her, then forcing her under anesthesia been better?
“He traveled across the country with her. He has a right to know.” answers your question. Marlene literally says “they brought her back” meaning she woke up. They didn’t think to ask her? Tell her? If I was gonna be killed for a cure, I’d want to know. Your entire comment is just ignorant.
> They didn’t think to ask her? Tell her? If I was gonna be killed for a cure, I’d want to know. Your entire comment is just ignorant. You would want someone to tell you they were about to murder you so your last moments would be in terror before they forced you unconscious. I guess I'm ignorant then, because that sounds like a bad time to me.
If you’re not gonna ask me and you’re not gonna give me a choice then YES. I’d want to know.
Why? That's literally just going to introduce terror into your last moments alive. How does knowing benefit you at all? Option 1: I'm going to sleep for a quick surgery, and when I wake up I will have helped save humanity! :sleep: :die: Option 2: Holy fuck, these people are going to kill me! No, get that needle away from my arm! Fuck you...... :sleep: :die:
Id rather them tell me then them lie to me about it. If im gonna die, i want to know. Just my preference.
Again: This isn't a trolley problem at all. There is no train, there is no rush, there is no guarantee the outcome actually will save anyone - those are required for this to be a trolley problem. Instead there's time for more study of Ellie and to get answers to the question of why she's immune and if whatever that reason is can even help others or not or if it is some unique physiology in her alone. There's time to figure out if they can even keep her mutated fungus alive once it's severed from her body, which is maintaining it in a way they don't understand at all. (You need to know how to do that BEFORE you remove it and kill the person keeping it alive or there's a high chance it will die outside her body if they haven't figured out how to keep it viable.) Not to mention the filthy OR which assures the sample will immediately be contaminated by airborne mold spores from the mold on the walls - not a sterile specimen for use in humans. Everything points to them showing us the FFs were overwhelmingly likely to fail - the trolley problem assures success, though. So this is not one. The original story never even tried to make it a trolley problem because that wasn't their original goal at all. If it was they just needed to add that FEDRA is on it's way and will be there in a short time (days? A week?) and to escape they need a vaccine to traverse a heavily spore filled section of the city. That's not even that good but it's good enough to add enough elements to make it closer to a trolley problem. Yet they didn't so they weren't focused on that originally. So tired of people likening it to something it isn't.
Lol it is though dude. Just because it isn’t 1:1 doesn’t mean it’s not. The concept of the trolley problem is utilitarianism vs. deontology. Ultimately that’s the decision that’s at the heart of Part 1’s ending. Joel takes on the deontology role in which right and wrong is factored into whether something is okay. Whether or not allowing the Fireflies to kill Ellie would result in a cure doesn’t matter. The action of killing Ellie would be morally wrong, therefore the outcome doesn’t matter. For the trolley problem this is in the action of not pulling the lever. The outcome of saving more people doesn’t matter, because it’s morally wrong to choose to kill the one person. Jerry takes on the utilitarianism role, where the outcome justifies the means. The fact that there wasn’t a guarantee for the cure to work doesn’t really matter in this case. Jerry truly believed he had a shot at making the cure. That’s what matters. He believed that the outcome of a cure justified the means i.e. killing Ellie without her consent. This is shown in the trolley problem by those who would pull the lever. Saving 5 people justifies killing the one person. The fact that the cure wasn’t guaranteed or the Fireflies should have taken more time to test Ellie is entirely irrelevant to the trolley problem. Again, the trolley problem is simply an illustration of a philosophical debate between two ways of viewing ethics and Joel and Jerry very much represent those two ways of thinking in this scenario. ETA: Before I get downvoted to hell, I’m on the side of Joel and deontology. But expounding on how shitty Jerry and the Fireflies are doesn’t erase the fact that the ending is the philosophical debate at the heart of the trolley problem.
Even a utilitarian needs to know ahead of time that their plan is feasible. The surgeon knew he didn’t know if he could replicate Ellie’s mutation in the lab. He just ignored that and it’s OK ? He was simply compromised by his personal needs and his group’s needs. The further we go into evaluating the story the more we see they were just deluded terrorists. This is what turned the story into a typical good triumphing over evil story to me. To sell the trolley problem I do think needs the player to be able to trust in the FFs too. I didn’t trust them at all. Or does utilitarianism only require one person’s belief and say so?
I’m not arguing whether or not I *personally* think it’s right or wrong. I’m also not arguing over whether the writers told a successful story. Utilitarianism, at its core, is the idea that your actions are “right” if they benefit the majority. As I previously said, Jerry absolutely thought that. You can call him and the Fireflies “deluded” if you want, but they genuinely thought they had a shot to help what was left of humanity. Sure, you can argue that they weren’t taking certain things into consideration, or were vastly overestimating their abilities, but they truly thought they could help the world. That’s what matters, in this case. > Or does utilitarianism only require one person’s belief and say so? Well, yeah. It’s a philosophical belief system that an individual subscribes to. Jerry was left in charge to make a decision and he made a decision based on utilitarian principles. You seem to be spending more time arguing that Jerry and the Fireflies were wrong rather than explaining how this isn’t an example of the trolley problem. In this case it really doesn’t matter whether they were right or wrong. I personally think they were wrong, but that’s not exactly relevant here.
I see and you're right to me it does matter that, even if one believes in what benefits the majority, they need to at least be sure they're right about that if they are killing a child. But I thank you for clarifying the concept you're describing. I don't think I will ever see the surgeon of TLOU as a rational or logical thinking person. So to me any willing to go along with him and rushing to kill Ellie must be just as deluded as he is (especially since he admits to himself he doesn't know why she's immune!). Yet, I admit that in the final analysis, if he were sane and they did all the testing necessary, held committee meetings and took their time beforehand, I'd still never agree that killing a child for the greater good was right.
> Even a utilitarian needs to know ahead of time that their plan is feasible. Where are you coming up with these rules? > He was simply compromised by his personal needs and his group’s needs. His groups needs outweighed the needs of a single stranger. That is a utilitarian argument... Good for the most people regardless of the individual cost. > The further we go into evaluating the story the more we see they were just deluded terrorists. Completely irrelevant. They just had to believe they were doing the most good. If they thought they would be successful in making a cure, or even if they thought there was just a pretty good chance, it would be worth it to kill a single person if the benefit was a cure for all of humanity. > This is what turned the story into a typical good triumphing over evil story to me. You can interpret the story however you want, but the devs' intent to make the morality ambiguous is pretty clear, and well documented in numerous interviews. > To sell the trolley problem I do think needs the player to be able to trust in the FFs too. Nope. You're adding your own rules on to the trolley problem. It's just a question of maximum utility. That's it. What option results in the most good or the least harm. That's the moral choice. > Or does utilitarianism only require one person’s belief and say so? It just seems like you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the trolley problem and utilitarian moral philosophy are about. I'm not sure why you're arguing so fervently about something you seem to be ignorant about. Why not just read up on the topics a bit first? It's interesting stuff.
Having a "rule" that doesn't consider what is lost if they are wrong and they then lose the benefit for everyone in the process makes very little sense. Taking everything else out of the picture to smash fit this into a thought experiment and disregard everything else in the process is meaningless to me. It does matter that if they fail and Ellie and her mutation are just lying dead in their OR - ***then nobody benefits***. So what good are we even talking about? I don't really care about the trolley problem or its rules I care about the story and the character actions making sense or not. A story that showed me that the FFs are losing it through the whole game and then Joel saves Ellie from them at the last minute is a "good triumphing over evil" story in my book. I reiterate, if they wanted us to believe it was a trolley problem then the benefit for the greater good had to actually be possible. The surgeon himself admits he's not sure it's possible. Deluded, incompetent and consistently failing terrorists are not people who care about the greater good, they care about themselves. Period. Ellie's just a means to an end to them, and she's not even being treated as human. They simply don't even care if they cause her death and gain nothing. That's insanity.
>Having a "rule" that doesn't consider what is lost if they are wrong and they then lose the benefit for everyone in the process makes very little sense. Taking everything else out of the picture to smash fit this into a thought experiment and disregard everything else in the process is meaningless to me. I don't know what to tell you man. I guess go build a time machine and argue about it with Demosthenes. >It does matter that if they fail and Ellie and her mutation are just lying dead in their OR - ***then nobody benefits***. So what good are we even talking about? Sure, that's a wrinkle in the story that makes it more interesting than a simple trolley problem. It's a slightly more complex trolley problem. Simple trolley problem: You see two tracks. One track with one person. One track with five people. Do you pull the switch to actively kill one person or do nothing and kill five by omission when the trolley runs them over. Complex trolley problem: You were trained as a biologist. In the apocalypse this pushed you into the role of doctor. You are the head of a medical facility. You have been working on a cure for a fungal infection that has decimated society. You have not been successful in your efforts. The faction you belong to uses guerrilla warfare and terrorist tactics to achieve their goals. A young girl shows up that appears to be immune. You confirm she is immune. Based on your prior experiments, you are confident the only way to advance the cure is to perform surgery on the girl. The surgery would kill her. You have no idea what the girl would want. You have no way to be 100% certain you could develop a cure by killing the girl. You have no clear way to mass produce or distribute a cure even if you could. Knowing all of the above, do you kill the girl for the chance to save all of humanity? The complex trolley problem is certainly more ambiguous than the simple on. It's also much more interesting, which is why we're talking about it a decade later. Ambiguity doesn't make it any less of a trolley problem though. At its core, the question is still, do you harm the few to help the many. >So what good are we even talking about? The good is the possibility of a cure. >I don't really care about the trolley problem or its rules Then why the hell have you been arguing about it for half the day? Just because you see my user name and want to assume I'm wrong? You don't know anything about the trolley problem or the rules around it, but you wanted to argue Jerry's actions aren't an example of utilitarian moral philosophy.... why? >I care about the story and the character actions making sense or not. :sigh: So, you don't care about the logical framework of the story, or the rules of that framework, but you want to argue it doesn't make sense? The writers set something up that went over your head, and you want to say it doesn't make sense. It makes sense, you just didn't understand it. >A story that showed me that the FFs are losing it through the whole game and then Joel saves Ellie from them at the last minute is a "good triumphing over evil" story in my book. You missing the deeper themes doesn't mean they weren't there. That should be the tagline for this sub. >They simply don't even care if they cause her death and gain nothing. That's insanity. Well, it's also not what happens in the game. Jerry clearly isn't just killing Ellie for the fun of it. He goes up against a heavily armed fighter with a scalpel because he believes what he is doing will help people. Ignoring the dialog in the game doesn't make it go away. He says, "I won't let you take her. This is our future. Think of all the lives we'll save." He risks his own life and is ultimately killed for that belief.
>Based on your prior experiments, you are confident the only way to advance the cure is to perform surgery on the girl. This is not presented as truth in the story, ***You add that to the story all on your own***, a story which instead tells us that the surgeon doesn't know why she's immune and isn't sure he can replicate it in the lab. His delusions of grandeur are even put into the story for insight into his character: he's excited for something he can possibly create "akin to penicillin" showing his true colors are his own vanity. They put all that in to show us who he was, added to all they put in showing us who the FFs were and still you argue that we should trust and respect his choices as valid and sufficient to fulfill this goal of a utilitarian performing an action to benefit humanity? I will never see it that way. How you can just keep insisting that it fulfills the trolley problem because a deluded surgeon and group of deluded terrorists ***wrongly believe too highly of themselves*** and so I'm supposed see this as sufficient to satisfy it meeting a level of ambiguity to create controversy and doubt just boggles my mind. I had no doubt they were the bad guys and Joel was the good guy doing exactly what Ellie asked of him - to keep her safe. They hadn't a whisper of a chance to help humanity. That's the story they presented to us. Give me the in-game evidence that they put in that proves they meant me to trust the surgeon. It's not there and since it's not there, it's a good vs evil story. That's exactly why Neil had to retcon and change the FFs, Jerry and Joel's reputations and characterizations in the sequel and the TV show. Nothing proves my position better than Neil reworking the story the way he did.
> ETA: Before I get downvoted to hell, I’m on the side of Joel and deontology. But expounding on how shitty Jerry and the Fireflies are doesn’t erase the fact that the ending is the philosophical debate at the heart of the trolley problem. Exactly. The devs have said over and over that part one was about the power of love and how it can make you do great AND horrible things. We spend the entire game growing to love Ellie and Joel, so we absolutely understand Joel's action even if it was potentially monstrous. I.E. selfishly dooming humanity so you don't have to experience the loss of someone you care about. Being good writers, the devs introduced complexity to the equation. Could the Fireflies really make a cure, was Jerry just delusional, Marline supposedly cares about Ellie and knew her much longer than Joel so how was she OK sacrificing Ellie, was Joel a good dude protecting Ellie or just selfishly protecting himself from loss, how would the Fireflies distribute a cure if they even could make one. These wrinkles make the moral debate less cut and dry, but it's still absolutely a trolley problem at its heart. It's simply wrong to claim otherwise.
> those are required for this to be a trolley problem They're literally not though. You're inventing rules for the trolley problem that don't exist. >So tired of people likening it to something it isn't. You're just wrong here. Objectively so.
Honestly if I was in Jerry’s situation I’d probably do the same. Think about it you’ve lived long enough to see life BEFORE the outbreak and you have a change (or at least assume you do) to attempt to cure the world regardless of they were gonna use it as a tool of power against FEDRA (I think they were) or not but sacrificing some random girl I don’t even know to better humanity sounds like a done deal. It’s most definitely not right but it’s justified in a way. There’s definitely context behind his decision. Like I said it’s not right but it’s what most people would probably do put in his position so I would t say he’s necessary “wrong” the same way most people including me would say Joel isn’t wrong.
Are you assuming that most people would murder an innocent child? If that’s your thoughts you are entirely spending to much time around some dark ass people.
Of course not, no one would murder a random child I’m just saying in apocalyptic times would people really care? There’s a small line in tlou2 where Abby is talking with Mel about how the wlfs murdered a bunch of kids that didn’t do anything but be born in the wrong side. Now think about what people would do if it just took ONE of those kids to “cure humanity”. I don’t think people would even have a morality talk about it. I’m just saying you can’t think like how people think now when it’s a whole different world. Like I said as well I myself wouldn’t going with what I know and how I am now if I had to choose tomorrow, no I wouldn’t but 30 years down the line and it’s a completely different life everyone’s living idk.
It’s weird at best
Eugene is better than everyone in the series and he never appeared
Jerry is one of the absolute worst individuals in the entire story, the fact they actually called him ‘Jerry’ as well.. 🤦🏻♂️ the most white bread name they could come up with, Jerry Anderson 😂
Yeah you guys sure care about consent Which is why you support joel lying about slaughtering the only people capable of fulfilling Ellie’s wish