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scientism comments on Life is Good, More Life is Better - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't want to die but I'm OK with other people dying. In most cases, to put it bluntly, I don't think it is a significant loss (although it might be a personal loss to me). There are some people in the world I'd fight very strongly to see them remain alive for as long as possible, even if they were reluctant (I speak here not of friends and family but of valuable contributors). But I've never understood the desire to save every life. It seems obvious to me that only a few people are here for the Life's Great Adventure and most are killing time until they kick the bucket. I take some issue with that (I think they're falling short of the Good) but it's not a problem that would be fixed by convincing them to change their attitudes towards death (the problem is their attitude towards life). The reason I want to live indefinitely is straightforward: I have some really longterm goals.
Funny. I feel the opposite way: I'm okay with dying, but don't want other people to die.
While I do tend toward suicidal thoughts, even when I'm feeling pretty great the idea of my life continuing is at best of low value. I would hate to die because I know it would hurt lots of people that I'm close to, and I'm also averse to the pain of the process of dying, but nonexistence is generally an attractive concept to me. If I could get away with dying in a manner that didn't hurt me or others, I probably would.
On the other hand, I would be and have been very pained at the death of others, or even at the thought of them dying. I would react very selfishly to keep people close to me from dying, and attempt to extend that near-mode behavior to far-mode action as well.
I don't want other people to die, and don't especially want to die myself. I do consider it fairly inevitable (in a competition between the sum total of mind design-space's most intelligent possible agents and statistics and entropy, my money's still on the latter, though I could be ignorant of some means of gaining write-access to reality's substrate that might make it possible) either way, but something worth resisting where and how you can.
It seems obvious to you. You might want to scrutinize your intuitions more closely, because unless you believe in some telos to history then this doesn't make sense. It also prompts me to wonder whether you might possess some of the cluster of traits attributable to diagnosed sociopaths (as that word is often very loaded, let me note that sociopathy seems to just be a normal part of human variation comprising about 3 percent of the population, most of them neither particularly-accomplished nor particularly dangerous to others); there are other factors I can think of that might tweak your intuitions thus, but it certainly enters the picture there.
Who do you think counts as someone here for "Life's Great Adventure?" How do you distinguish these people, and on what basis do you conclude that this explains the traits they display rather than something else (statistical normalization acting on population genetics, circumstantial factors, spandrels of history, meddling deities, them being the ones the Simulation is about, or almost anything else...)
As a virtue ethicist, I do believe in a moral telos of sorts. I believe that somebody who's here for Life's Great Adventure is working towards a greater good, exhibits a high level of self-discipline and shuns the kind of apathetic hedonism that characterises most of modern Western society. Generally I base my assessment on testimony.