LogFAQs > #972151976

From a purely practical perspective, we have no guarantee that the "cure" would even work; yknow, given it had never been done before and was being handled by a Mengele hack in a basement. The fireflies had no practical way to distribute it, especially given they were enemies if the state. A state that had gone completely power-crazed and may well shut down the cure effort, themselves, for their own twisted reasons. A regime shift to the fireflies had a lot of potential to be just as bad for the survivors. There's a lot there to give pause.

There's also the greater ethical implications of murdering an unconscious girl to harvest her brain, without her consent. You can argue that she would have wanted it either way - the fact is, she wasn't given a choice, so whatever she "would have wanted" is moot. She was suckered into a death trap under false pretenses, which is ethically repugnant regardless of the utilitarian result.

Regardless, none of this really matters, because Joel wasn't actually thinking about any of this. He was out for blood in the name of protecting someone he was attached to, no matter the cost. The point is that even if everything was on the up and up, Joel WOULD throw the world under the bus to protect Ellie.

Whether it's a reasonable request to ask someone who's lost so much to just let the last real person he cares about get murdered for some nebulous "greater good" is another question. Good or evil, it's human, and that's the point. Do we save "the last of us," or do we save "the last of US?"