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soreff comments on Costs to (potentially) eternal life - Less Wrong
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Your overall point seems to be: "If some people live a really, really long time, and others don't, we won't value the lives of the 'mortals' as much as we do those of the 'immortals.'"
But don't we value saving nine-year-olds more than ninety-year-olds? The real question is, "If I'm immortal, why aren't they?"
You also miss the obvious positive effects of valuing life more greatly. War would be virtually impossible between immortal nations, at least insofar as it requires public support and soldiers. It would also be (to some degree) morally defensible for immortal nations to value citizen-lives higher than they value the lives of mortal-nations, which means they would be more willing to use extreme force, which means mortal nations would be much more hesitant to provoke immortal nations. Also, our expenditures on safety and disaster preparedness would probably increase exponentially, and our risk-taking would also decrease dramatically.
In other words, I'm not sure this post clearly communicates your point, and, to the extent it does, your point seems underdeveloped and quite probably bad.
This depends to an extent on the nature of the immortalizing technology. I agree with you if the technology doesn't permit backups, but I disagree with you if backups can be done (at least with respect to the risk of local death). In particular an uploading-based technology, with an easy way to make backups, might result in the average person taking more risks (at least risks of one copy being killed - but not the whole ensemble of backups) than they do now.
I'm not yet sold on the perfect substitutability of backups, but the point, while interesting, is quite irrelevant in this context. If backups aren't perfect substitutes, they won't affect people's behaviour. If they are, then increased risk is essentially immaterial. If I don't care about my mortality because I can be easily resurrected, then the fundamental value of me taking risks changes, thus, the fact that I take more risks is not a bad thing.
Now, there may be a problem that people are less concerned with other people's lives, because, since those people are backed up, they are expendable. The implications there are a bit more complex, and that issue may result in problems, though such is not necessarily the case.
Richard Morgan's sci-fi trilogy, Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies have an entertaining take on the implications of universal backups.
Many thanks!