Joan Could Have Been So Much Worse

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]If Joan from Telltale Games: The Walking Dead season 3 had chosen to raid other raiders instead of just individual settlements, would that be a little more ethical? Welcome back to Lost and Games Unscripted, the series where I talk about pretty much whatever comes to mind at any given time. And in this instance, that happens to be Joan and season 3 of Telltale Games: The Walking Dead. Yeah, the least popular season, the one that nobody really likes to talk about, but we're talking about it today. So, I had a comment on one of my recent videos.

[00:00:29]Uh, it was the where I was talking about should raiders and post-apocalyptic settings be forgiven. Um, the comment was from I I I don't want to say this name wrong. I think I feel like I'm going to butcher it. Um, but I'll put it up on the screen here.

[00:00:43]Um, the the basically what they were asking was maybe to raid other less ethical raiders. Um, maybe that would be a thing that you should do or focus on.

[00:00:54]would that be more ethical? And I loved that comment because basically that leads down the path of thinking that something that's called the slippery slope fallacy. Um, and in this instance, it's not it's not really a fallacy, but I'll explain the slippery slope first.

[00:01:10]The the slippery slope fallacy um is essentially where you start to kind of extrapolate what could potentially happen, making going to the most uh the most wild conclusion possible. Um, so you you say something like, um, you know, if if this one little thing, if we allow this one little thing, is this going to lead to these other crazier things down the road?

[00:01:34]And sometimes that is illogical. It doesn't make any sense. It's like these two things aren't connected. They don't make any sense. But in a situation when it comes to a post-apocalyptic society like where Joan and and the the the community there in Richmond had going.

[00:01:53]Uh you start to think, well, what if they had started? What if Joan had proposed to them when they first were trying to get settled in? They were trying to get through the winter. What if she had said, "Hey, there's this other settlement that out there that we know, you know, maybe she had heard it from a scout or something like that. They go out and they raid other people and they pillage and they steal things and they kill other people.

[00:02:15]You know, maybe we should go take things from them and we'll kill them off.

[00:02:21]That'll do be net good for the world.

[00:02:23]You know, no more, you know, get rid of a group of raiders and we get a bunch of stuff to help us maybe make it through the winter. And if the council had agreed to that and they had said, "Yeah, that's not a bad idea. Let's do that."

[00:02:36]Because that way we're we're it's a it's a double double win, right? We're getting rid of raiders and we're getting goods.

[00:02:43]But something like that very easily can escalate from just taking things from known raiders to taking things from, well, I heard this group was raiding people. Um, one of the scouts said they were raiding people. We'll go ahead and take things from them, too. Or, hey, this group's getting kind of desperate over here.

[00:03:04]They're struggling. They're having some troubles. um they they are very close to turning to you know I've heard some people with some chatter that you know they might be turning into raiders maybe we should just go ahead and take them out to prevent them from turning into raiders and it very easily escalates and we see this in the real world as well we see it in a sense of where the world used to be uh we go back to World War II for instance right world war II was one of those situations where you had a country that was kind of actually starting to try to take over the world and everybody else was reacting to that. After that, once we get into the Cold War, it became more preventative measures. Well, we have to prevent this group from spreading. We have to prevent this group, this country from getting weapons and that kind of thing. It was it was one of those deals where it was it went from defensive and protecting ourselves to we need to go on the offensive just in case.

[00:04:04]And as we've seen that in the real world, we would see that as well in a situation like Richmond or in a post-apocalyptic situation. If you're ever in that, you know, not that not that we would necessarily be in a post-apocalyptic world, but if you were ever in a situation where you were in a group and that group said, "Hey, what if we start doing this? What if we start taking out these these other groups, these other raiders, because, you know, we're going to help people out and we can get their supplies and everything will be fine.

[00:04:34]That's when you need to go whoa whoa whoa let's stop this. All right. It's one thing if that group of raiders has already attacked us and we are retaliating. We are defending ourselves.

[00:04:45]It's another thing to be preemptive about it because in a situation where you are saying we're going to raid other raiders. You know it's only a matter of time before you take that leap. It's just human psychology because it's it's easy.

[00:05:01]We've talked about making good people do bad things in the past with talking about Fallout uh Fallout 4 specifically and the the Institute and the situation there. It's easy to get people to do bad things by just making them feel threatened by making them feel like, hey, this group maybe right now isn't a threat to us, but down the road it could kind of be a threat to us. They're training their kids to fight and so we've got to do something about that. we got to stop that from happening. Uh it's it's something that is explored and if you look at the Walking Dead show is a perfect example.

[00:05:38]Uh it when it comes to the Saviors and somebody else had brought this up at one point in a comment, the Saviors, Rick's group attacks the satellite outpost, right? And it turns out that that was only part of the the saviors.

[00:05:55]But their whole thing is we're going to be defensive because we're protecting all these settlements that the saviors have been, you know, they they've come to the hilltop. They've come to the kingdom.

[00:06:04]They've been they've been attacking the the the Alexandria, that kind of thing.

[00:06:09]So, we're going to take them out before they get to us.

[00:06:12]In reality, we know that wasn't the case. But what if somebody had said, you know, what what if somebody had said that that satellite outpost was a threat when it wasn't a threat, when they weren't saviors there because they wanted to take them out. And what if you had told all of the people, what if Rick and the group had said, "Hey, these sat the satellite outpost that we're going to go attack, these are all bad guys. We need to take them out." You know, and they had decided to go and take them out because maybe Rick didn't like the look of one of them. Maybe maybe Daryl. Maybe Daryl ran into one of them and uh the guy scuffed up his boots or something and he decided we're going to take you guys out. You know, where does it end?

[00:06:56]Where you you can only push it so far.

[00:06:58]But it is a slippery slope. In reality, the the right situation for uh for Richmond would have been to have Jones say, "We're not going to raid settlements, but we're going to offer them a home. We're going to go to them and we're going to say, "Hey, we've got a build up. We've got a whole place built up here. We've got walls. We got all this. We want to bring you in, bring all of your supplies in, and we can all work together." Or set up a trading situation. We're going to trade with you. We're going to say, "Hey, you've got stuff, we've got stuff. You know, we can trade back and forth. Maybe we can focus on one thing, you can focus on another, at least in the short term."

[00:07:37]Because if you if you can focus your resources on one particular thing, you know, for instance, um now this could become a protection racket, but a situation where Richmond says, "We have a lot of weapons. We have a lot of experienced personnel, military personnel. You know, we can provide some people to help you guys out to keep you safe so you don't have to focus on that and you can focus on growing food."

[00:08:04]You know, maybe that could be a thing.

[00:08:06]The problem with that is it kind of runs it, like I said, into a protection racket. But if you're careful with it, you know, trading goods, trading services, that's not really out of the realm of of what we do today in the modern world. You know, there are companies that hire security agencies all the time because they they need security for their site, and they don't want to invest in their own security, so they hire somebody to come in and do it for them so they can focus on their one thing they're good at, you know, and that works in a post-apocalyptic world as well. Uh, but I I want to know your thoughts. Um, I want to make sure I didn't forget anything here. Oh, talk about why Jones system can't be morally justified. We could talk about that, too. Because when it comes to moral justifications in these systems, it's really kind of interesting. You know, you've got deont a couple different systems that I focus on typically are deontology and utilitarianism.

[00:08:56]Um and Joan way of doing things whether it is raiding the raiders or just raiding settlements there is no moral justification for that because if you look at it from deontology it's very clear that no killing no harming no no hurting anybody else that kind of thing is where deontology typically falls. You have a very mor black and white moral system. Even even utilitarianism though doesn't really fit well when it comes to Joan's idea of well we're just going to raid them so we can make it through the winter.

[00:09:30]You're getting their goods, but you're you're doing more harm than good. You know, ultimately those people that community that you just raided, that you just killed all their people and took all of their stuff, they could have been an an overall net positive for for the community.

[00:09:45]And in reality, the more communities that you have that are working together, the safer you all are. Even if you're separate communities, even little towns that are separate from each other, if you're working together, if you're trading together, sharing news, sharing resources, if one community has some trouble when you're another community could jump in and help them out. So by taking all of their supplies, even from a utilitarian perspective, where the idea is that you're trying to do the thing that's going to be the most good for the most people, even that doesn't work in utilitarian perspective because you're not helping everybody. You know, you're not improving the world overall.

[00:10:20]You're making things worse for everybody in the long run because you're weaker to have fewer groups. And when those groups are afraid, when new groups that pop up hear about, hey, you maybe you got survivors from one of the groups that that wound up getting away and they're like, hey, we got to we got to be careful. We don't want to we know what's going to happen if we uh cross this, you know, we want to make sure to stay away from them. We aren't going to work with them at all. Even if they need desperate help, we're not going to come to their to their aid, right? So, you're you're you're causing more problems for yourself in the long run. So there's no moral justification for Jones way of doing things and it is a slippery slope from what she is suggest you know even if she started off suggesting we will only attack raiders it's a slippery slope that's easy to fall down to well we just need to do the stuff to get through we we can use the resources better than they can or they might be a threat down the road. We never know if they're going to turn on us. Sure they're friendly today but maybe tomorrow they're going to be enemies.

[00:11:19]So, not only is there no moral justification, but you also can't, you know, can easily wind up doing some pretty awful things following down that that stretch. But I want to know what you all think in the comments below. And I want to hear your suggestions for other topics because like I said, this this one was inspired by a comment on a prior video. And when I get those kind of comments, I love talking about that kind of stuff and and you know, driving the conversation forward because ultimately I want these videos to be conversation starters. You know, I I won't always share complete thoughts because I I want them to be something where we can discuss things and go back and forth and whether it's in the comments or a follow-up video, whatever that happens to be. So, leave your comments down below. If you want to help the channel out, you can subscribe. You can hit the like button down below if you enjoyed the video. you can join as a channel member or uh Patreon over on Patreon. I've got those things set up as well. So, all of that goes a long way towards helping me to achieve my goals in the long run um and have keep keep making this these kind of videos and the philosophy and ethics series. So, that's all I've got for this one. I want to thank you all for watching everybody.

[00:12:26]Have a great rest of your day and I will see you in the next