The Morality of the Last of Us

Joel died a hero, not a villain.

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Confession time: I used to be a huge gamer.

I’m not just talking about a Nintendo Wii, an Xbox, or a PlayStation—although I have sunk more than my fair share of hours into these consoles. I’m talking about PC gaming. No, not “politically correct” gaming, but personal computer gaming.

In sixth grade, I built the first iteration of my gaming rig and have marginally improved it since then, adding more RAM, replacing weaker GPUs with stronger ones, etc. Even in high school, I spent my limited free time playing games like CS:GO with my brother and friends on the weekends. College was the death knell to my gaming hobby. And for good reason—I was busy making new friends, getting involved with extracurricular activities I was actually passionate about (and not just doing to get into college), and generally having more fun in the real world.

However, my love for video games never quite disappeared because my love of philosophy, literature, and compelling narratives has only grown. Therefore, when I returned home from my fall quarter, I endeavored to play The Last of Us. The post-apocalyptic zombie survival horror game has been critically acclaimed for its compelling character-driven story and visual fidelity since its exclusive PlayStation release in 2013. With my friends and brother still away at their semester-based universities, my PC rig at my off-campus apartment, and finally enough time on my hands, I decided to play the game.

The Last of Us is divided into seasons and, at the time of writing, I have just begun winter (the game starts in the summer). That means I just witnessed Joel die while defending Ellie from yet another roving band of marauders. Joel’s unexpected—we had been playing as him for the entire game—demise at the hands of brigands reminded me of an earlier part of the game. Ellie and Joel get ambushed by “hunters”, i.e., cannibalistic predatory human scavengers, while driving through Pittsburgh. When Ellie asks Joel how he knew they were being lured into a trap, Joel casually drops that he was personally familiar with the strategy the hunters employed against them… because he himself used to be a hunter.

Shocker! Joel implies here that, sometime after the beginning of the apocalypse and the death of his daughter, he lived by stealing from, murdering, and otherwise preying upon innocent people. By some moral standards, this fact should make Joel a villain. And yet, he clearly isn’t. Joel is beloved by fans of the game because, underneath his gruff and ragged exterior, he is a hero who goes to extreme lengths, both literally and figuratively, to bring Ellie to the Fireflies so that her blood might save what remains of humanity from the demon spore plague.

By the time we’re playing as Joel, he is practicing virtue. Sure, he has a morally abominable past, but he is no longer actively behaving immorally. In fact, his actions are supererogatory. He is risking, and eventually loses, his life to protect a little girl. Of course, one’s past actions are often a reliable predictor of future behavior. With good reason, we anticipate further immorality from someone who has demonstrated their capacity for evil and are more trusting of those with an unblemished moral record. Yet, in reality, people don’t have perfectly homogeneous moral records: even the vicious man occasionally demonstrates humanity and beneficence but shouldn’t be regarded as virtuous. Nobody would dispute that. Analogously, yet more controversially, the virtuous man who occasionally succumbs to vice ought not to be regarded as irredeemably vicious, provided he picks himself up and resumes his practice of virtue.

What matters is that we leverage past viciousness to inform future virtue rather than abusing ourselves with guilt, shame, and regret, i.e., self-flagellating, until we die. Paraphrasing from Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, oftentimes, the remote effect of vice is virtue. Through the character of Joel, The Last of Us makes an intuitive, aesthetically-compelling case for virtue ethics.