A Lot of My Favorite Stories Used to Be About How There Are No Good People
Morally ambiguous stories—whether they're about zombies, or cops—are fun sometimes, but they don't make you a better person
Frame from The Last of Us Part II
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I will talk about cops later in this essay, but indulge me for a minute.
There’s a new Last of Us game out today. If you’re not familiar with The Last of Us, it’s a particularly bleak flavor of zombie shooting game with good gameplay—shooting digital zombies is about as perfect a primal rush as you could ever want. I haven’t played this new one yet (New games are usually about $60. I prefer to buy games once they get to around $20, thanks), but I have already read the spoilers for The Last of Us Part II. I went into the first game fresh, having heard it was one of those rare games that told a worthwhile story like Metal Gear Solid. But the plot twist at the end of the first Last of Us game really got under my skin, which, granted, is exactly what it was supposed to do. And, since I peeked, I know that similar plot devices are used in The Last of Us Part II. The writers of this series absolutely love to corner the player with a good trolley problem, a.k.a., this thing:
A certain kind of person—a certain kind of dude, usually—loves any sort of ethical catch-22. A moral Kobayashi Maru, basically, which is an unsolvable puzzle from Star Trek, used as a test for spaceship captains. “I love the moral ambiguity in [Star Trek] Discovery,” wrote one Redditor in 2018. Discourse around moral ambiguity in movies is a very normal thing to see on Reddit. Denis Villeneuve, director of the upcoming Dune adaptation, made a name for himself as the current go-to director for dude’s-night-in movie nights, having directed orgies of moral ambiguity like Sicario, Prisoners, and his earlier Incendies.
The Last of Us Part II is too new to spoil, so I won’t be doing that. Without further ado, however, I will, for the purpose of illustrating my point, spoil the ending of The Last of Us 1, so skip the next three paragraphs if you don’t want to know this information.
After a long zombie adventure, the protagonist’s adopted daughter figure is rendered unconscious, and is taken into custody by a medical team. Since she is immune to the zombie pathogen, her body’s essential juices can be distilled into a global zombie cure, but, we learn, these doctors will have to let her die to obtain the juices. So, in a split-second decision, the protagonist—abetted by you, the player—massacres the doctors, shoots his way through the hospital, and frees his adopted daughter figure. His real daughter had died at the start of the game by the way, and I’d be remiss not to mention that here. Anyway, there will be no global zombie cure now. The end.
The protagonist chooses the life of one person over the lives of many people, and I, the player, pulled the trigger—oh, the ambiguity! And while switching the tracks in the most basic version of the trolley problem is generally thought of as a pretty easy choice, it’s tough to articulate a clear argument that the protagonist of The Last of Us is somehow wicked, because we know the circumstances he was presented with, and his personal history. I really must be quite a mature adult with a powerful command of many complex ideas to stomach this painful ending, you tell yourself.
It’s a good zombie-killing game, but the ending is a very carefully calibrated trolley problem. It’s hard to imagine the ending working if the circumstances were at all different. Rampant, global zombie-ism is an evil visited upon humanity that is more or less infinite in its magnitude, so such an evil would be worth, it would seem, nearly any sacrifice to quell. In other words, we’re not putting anyone’s morality in peril for some minor victory like getting Major League Baseball back on TV. On the other hand, the adopted daughter figure was taken into custody involuntarily and while unconscious. In these circumstances, she would be sent to her death without any say in the matter, but it seems to me that many people might willingly sacrifice their own lives if the stakes were this high. She’s also young, and in a state where she can be restored fully to health if she’s saved—so in that way this is easier than when doctors have to choose which coronavirus patients receive lifesaving treatments. A tweak in any one of these factors would simplify the problem, and change the moral calculus. The setup has to be just right to be an effective trolley problem.
But it’s edifying, one assumes, just to puzzle over moral quandaries like this, right? According to UC-Riverside’s Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher and psychologist who researches real-world moral choices: maybe not. For a 2015 paper Schwitzgebel cowrote with Fiery Cushman called “Philosophers’ biased judgments persist despite training, expertise and reflection,” Schwitzgebel and Cushman tested professional philosophers, alongside hundreds of non-philosphers, for their ability to puzzle out a series of three trolley problems effectively—titled “Push,” “Drop,” and “Switch.” There was no significant difference in performance between philosophers and non-philosophers.
A trolley problem, is “a nice, clean problem” Schwitzgebel told The Atlantic in 2015. But he also said, “there is a certain lack of external validity to it.”
Surely though, it’s helpful to look at morality in shades of gray, right? Rather than just broad, cartoonish heroes and villains, like a child playing, say, cops and robbers?
On my seventh birthday I got a police costume—a police costume minus the gun actually, because my mom didn’t let me play with toy guns. But I did get a pair of plastic handcuffs that kinda worked (Anyone could pry open the female side of the ratchet clasp thing that held them together, so if I cuffed you, you were always at liberty to not remain cuffed). Even without the gun part of the act, I was roleplaying as someone whose job it was to bind people’s hands together and drag them off to whatever part of the house I had designated the jail. It was the laundry room I think.
This was 1991, and you might say I had a pretty simplified idea of what the police did. According to TV, police protected cities from gangs, which were in turn run by malevolent kingpins. This message was not necessarily overtly racialized in the form intended for the mass consumption of kids, such as Robocop the cartoon show, or COPS the cartoon show, which, by the way, is older than the other more famous Cops show:
The lesson I took from police shows was that there are evildoers, and it is cops who are working to stop them. Gangs in cartoons were headed by cartoon kingpins—older, fatter, richer guys. The street toughs who worked for them were under their spell, and needed to be taken off the streets to make the kingpins less powerful. Crime was, basically, a temporary institution brought about by the wrongdoing of a handful of people, and fortunately this institution was being dismantled by the police.
My police—the ones in Riverside, California were in a similar situation. Unlike on the show COPS, where the main character is black, most of the police in Riverside—or the ones on the TV news, who were in Los Angeles—were white and latino, and a shocking number of the gang members on the news were black, as it happened. And instead of stealing jewels like in cartoons, they sold drugs. Who could say why? It’s not something cartoons or the TV news devoted any time to thinking about. When the LA riots happened the next year, I knew what was happening: gangs, doing gang stuff. And the news confirmed it.
All of which is to say that I thought this would be done someday. What seemed so noble about being a cop was that I thought they were risking so much to accomplish something great—a society ultimately at peace. Then the world slowly and eerily revealed to me that the police weren’t making themselves obsolete by dismantling the gangs, and stopping crime. Police departments had been around for a long time, and cities weren’t about to shut them down. Worse, around the time I was ten I found out that at least one policeman, Mark Fuhrman, one of the detectives who testified in the O.J. Simpson case, was—get this—a huge racist.
From there, I consumed a lifetime’s worth of morally ambiguous cops on TV. I watched NYPD Blue, a show where a cop kills a drug dealer in cold blood for selling his hospitalized cousin a fateful dose of heroin, then finds out he killed the wrong drug dealer and kills himself. I watched The Wire, in which a cop with frequently valiant tendencies, stimulates public interest in an otherwise stale murder case by kidnapping a mentally ill homeless man and lying to the press about it. Bad cops are just human, after all. They’re doing their best a lot of the time, you know?
The second police costume I ever wore was given to me by the LAPD in 2016, when I role-played as a cop for a couple hours at the LAPD’s exhibition of a program meant to illustrate the police department’s newfound “reverence for human life.” I wrote about this for Vice at the time.
The climax of the demonstration was a simulated domestic violence call, and I wasn’t at all told how to deal with people inside. I tried to get a guy to stop shouting and threatening his pregnant wife, but then he pulled out a knife and darted toward her, saying something like “I’m gonna finish you right here and now.” So I struggled with my holster, and eventually pulled out my simulated sidearm. Then I unloaded on the guy with click after click. After getting the signal that the trigger had been pulled, he collapsed in slow motion, and wedged himself noisily between a coffee table and a couch, knocking stuff off the table and upsetting the set dressing in the simulation. I wish he had just said “OK, I have died.”
About two weeks earlier, LAPD cops had stopped a black guy named Keith Bursey while he was driving with his girlfriend and some friends. The cops said they smelled weed, took Keith’s friend’s knife, and then Keith took off and ducked between two parked cars, and one of the cops shot him. He died, similarly wedged between two bulky objects. No cop has ever been charged for Keith’s murder.
The example I was presented with was a pretty easy call. So easy, in fact, that you’d have to call it a case of suicide-by-cop, which is a very real thing. I had a (fake) gun, and it was the quickest way to make sure the pregnant lady didn’t get slashed open with a (fake) knife. I also had (fake) pepper spray and a (fake) beanbag gun, but something told me in the sequence of simulated police scenarios, this was the one where you were supposed to use the gun. If I’d been told I was a simulated hospital orderly, or a simulated nightclub bouncer, I would have known it was when I was supposed to tackle the guy and wrestle the knife out of his hand, but I was a (fake) cop. Cops are called upon by society to shoot people, and this, ostensibly, is what that’s like.
That scenario was created by a cop named Nathan Hooper, and he didn’t want it to be lost on me that I had less-lethal options available to me and I chose to shoot the stabby guy with my extremely lethal gun. “At any point in time did you consider utilizing that?” he said, pointing at my pepper spray. I was stumped. Maybe I should have? I had no answer other than to say I still thought using my gun was the last resort—he was gonna kill that poor woman! But Hooper let me off the hook. It was like he was just kidding by bugging me about the pepper spray. He shook my hand and said “Great job,” and, “You saved a life in there.” That felt good.
There’s this guy you might have heard of named Dave Grossman who gives seminars to cops about how to get over their natural aversion to killing. Grossman runs a company called the “Killology Research Group.” He’s gotten rich and famous off his seminars and books. He might not seem like the type, but he’s a big critic of violent video games like The Last of Us, which he thinks cause mass shootings, something he is empirically wrong about:
From a military and law enforcement perspective, violent videogames are “murder simulators” that train kids to kill. They act just like police and military simulators, providing conditioned responses, killing skills and desensitization, except they are inflicted on children without the discipline of military and police training.
But what I find interesting about Grossman is just how much he seems to romanticize killing. For instance, here’s one version of a spiel he’s given on killing countless times.
The average individual reacts to killing like this: the first thing that happens is, when you've actually killed someone there's this feeling of euphoria. Exhilaration. You've hit your target. You've done your job. You've saved your life. You've saved your friend's life. It is satisfaction.
Granted, Grossman goes on to talk about the struggle and trauma that sets in sometimes after the initial high, but something seems off about that initial high part. Just from my own simulated experience, some of what Grossman is saying feels wrong—I didn’t actually enjoy watching that guy even so much as pretend to fall down dead one bit. It was nothing like blowing up an animated zombie’s head with a video game shotgun.
We talk about guns like they are magic wands that only do Avada Kedavra. They’re not. I actually have one, and I’ve practiced shooting it enough to know I suck at it, and it makes me miserable. It hurts my hands, and aiming is tricky. I have no knack for shooting, and no motivation to practice because I don’t care for the noise. Shooting someone in real life would require me to direct my properly-loaded gun at the person with the safety off, and then, assuming I’m not super close get the sites to line up on a tactically appropriate part of the person (the “center of mass” as gun guys love to say), and then squeeze the trigger, producing a loud noise that I hate, possibly multiple times.
There’s this famous example of a British soldier in World War I, Julian Grenfell who loved war, and in fact later wrote in a letter, “I adore war.” Here’s a passage from Grenfell’s diary (edited by King's College, London psychologist Edgar Jones):
I crawled on to the parapet of their [the Germans’] trench. It was very exciting. . . . I peered through their loophole, and saw nobody in the trench. Then the German behind put his head up again . . . I saw his teeth glisten against my foresight, and I pulled the trigger very steady. He just gave a grunt and crumpled up.
What jumps out to me about this passage is that Grenfell is clearly a much better shot than me. Jones characterizes this, “not so much as enjoyment in killing but as competing when the stakes were at their highest.” Jones writes that “in general, the highs of war were outweighed by the lows.” He finds examples of other soldiers who profess a love for war, but on the whole, it’s not to be equated with a love for killing the enemy even though that seems to be a factor. As one soldier writes:
Of my memories of life in the trenches, the one thing I cherish more than anything else is the comradeship that grew up between us as a result of the way of life we were compelled to lead—living together under the open sky, night and day, fair weather or foul, witnessing death or injury, helping in matters of urgency, and above all, facing the enemy. Such situations were the solid foundation on which our comradeship was built. It has been said that such comradeship died when the war ended.
It might just be the case that killing isn’t all that fun, and that if you enjoy it, something is really wrong with you. Video game killing is fun. They’re very different, and moral ambiguity in video games is just window-dressing, not anything to take seriously. This might sound silly, but you have to understand that the tone of The Last of Us is very serious.
In a much more overtly cartoonish example of almost the exact same thing, there’s this other game which is much older, called Bioshock. Unlike in The Last of Us, in Bioshock, you’re presented with an actual binary choice: you don’t have to kill the little girl, but if you do you get awesome power-ups! Here’s what that part of Bioshock is like:
This happens a dozen or so more times as you go along. There are rewards down the line for saving the little girls, but they don’t even equate to what you get for accepting the power ups. So is it worth it? That’s a stupid question. As I put it on Twitter the other day:
The thing about video games trying to make me feel guilty is they can't ever. I bought the game specifically to kill fake people. If I can kill fake people better or faster by blowing up a fake convalescent home, I'll do it 10 times out of 10 as soon as I'm prompted.
"We programmed this part of the game in such a way that the player has to make a moral choice..." A moral choice not to get my money's worth from [a] game about gun murder? Nice try!
In other words, you can play this killing-themed game as a good killer or a bad killer. You can brand yourself good or evil—give yourself a good or evil paint job essentially. But grappling with morality inside the moral universe of Bioshock, or any moral thought experiment, looks like it has maybe nothing at all to do with morality in the real world. As Schwitzgebel and Cushman write, “[I]f there is a level of philosophical expertise that reduces the influence of factors such as order and frame upon one’s moral judgments, we have yet to find empirical evidence of it.”
Speaking for myself, I sometimes think all the moral complexity in the fiction I consume might actually be making ethics seem harder than it sometimes should be. And if I were a cop, that might lead me to weird seizures in the moral part of my brain, like the one 57 Buffalo, New York police officers had the other day when they resigned from crowd control duty in an act of protest. But instead of protesting police brutality, they were protesting the suspension without pay of the two officers deemed most responsible for the extremely, obviously, painfully reprehensible act of shoving 75-year-old Martin Gugino to the ground, hearing his skull crack, watching blood pool around his head, and not doing anything about it.
Circling wagons around the people who did this is obviously the wrong move, and it’s crazy that 57 Buffalo cops don’t see that. A right-wing lawyer named T. Greg Doucette has been using a single Twitter thread to track examples of police doing obviously heinous things during this wave of protests. He was up to 559 such items last I checked, but that won’t last long.
Cops have a tendency to argue that they have a hard job, that they don’t do anything evil, and that occasionally it might look that way because they’re doing their level best in a morally ambiguous world. As one cop named Seth Templeton wrote in an op-ed in The Baltimore Sun called “An open letter to a protester from a Baltimore County police officer”:
[T]he sad fact of the matter is, I am one person, and my range of control doesn’t extend very far beyond my own decisions. But I do what I can, and I try to lead by example. Still, I can’t possibly account for the actions of the 800,000 police officers in this country. Most, like me, strive for good. Some, being merely human, make mistakes.
Templeton’s op-ed is maudlin and ridiculous. But a younger version of me might have bought into his argument that police are in a tough situation, and that they’re just doing their best. I would have definitely felt that way when I was in the middle of watching The Wire. David Simon, the creator of The Wire thinks a policy like police abolition is too simple. His show was about moral complexity, and, to this day, the only answer he accepts is a complex one:
To be clear, I do not at all think we need to get rid of moral complexity in our fiction. And maybe most people don’t instinctively take these kinds of things as seriously as I do. Maybe you already know this, but the moral complexity in The Wire and The Last of Us is an attribute in those pieces of content, not a virtue. If you find those things to be a slog, turn them off!
If, like me, you’d honestly rather watch a simpler detective show like Columbo, or play a simpler zombie game like Resident Evil that’s not because you’re unwilling to contemplate tough questions. Contemplating tough questions probably doesn’t do anything to make you a better person anyway. Some violence is fun. Some isn’t. Some moral complexity makes for an interesting plot. Some make you miserable. But neither makes you a better person.
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