as a counter force to arrogance

Does that even work? I'm thinking that an arrogant person will generally shrug off the mortality thing and go on with being arrogant, barring some near-death experience.

as a force to act now

Or at least "this decade" rather than "some day". But death seems like a steep cost for this benefit. Is there another way to get it? Like, if we've got immortal people anyway, we're going to want to have a retirement equivalent, but it won't be a matter of working forty years and taking the rest of your life off. What if we had a system whereby people took ten years off work after every thirty or so, with a guaranteed salary during that time that's more than sufficient for living? Then you would have a specific timeframe in which you are expected to relax, take long vacations, knock off a life goal or two, that sort of thing.

That requires reworking social security / state pensions and probably requires a lot more wealth in general to enact. But we don't currently have a cure for death, so there's time to work out how to deal with a lack of death and enact those policies.

That's a very long paragraph, I'm going to do my best but some things may have been lost in the wall of text.

I understand the difference between terminal and instrumental values, but your conclusion doesn't follow from this distinction. You can have multiple terminal values. If you terminally value both not-lying and also (to take a silly example) chocolate cake, you will lie to get a large amount of chocolate cake (where the value of "large" is defined somewhere in your utility function). Even if your only terminal value is not-lying, you might find yourself in an odd corner case where you can lie once and thereby avoid lying many times elsewhere. Or if you also value other people not lying, you could lie once to prevent many other people from lying.

a deontological obligation to maximize utility

AAAAAAAAAAAH

you should be prudent in achieving your deontological obligations

It is prudent to be prudent in achieving your deontological obligations. Putting "should" in that sentence flirts with equivocation.

won't your deontological commitments dictate which virtues you must have, for example honesty, or even courage, so as to act in line with your deontological obligations

I think it's possible to act completely morally acceptably according to my system while having whopping defects of character that would make any virtue ethicist blush. It might be unlikely, but it's not impossible.

To those who think that death should be a choice. What about the benefits of knowing that we are mortal, which death by choice doesn't allow for. e.g. as a counter force to arrogance and as a force to act now, and so as we age to start reevaluating our priorities, in other words, the benefits while we live to knowing that we are mortal may outweigh the benefit of immortality. I suspect these concerns have been dealt with on this site, so if they have feel free to link me to an appropriate post instead of writing a new response,

What is the difference between saying that there is an obligation to tell the truth, or honesty being a virtue or that telling the truth is a terminal value which we must maximize in a consequentialist type equation.

The first thing says you must not lie. The second thing says you must not lie because it signifies or causes defects in your character. The third thing says you must not lie unless there is a compensatory amount of something else encouraging you to lie. The systems really don't fuse this prettily unless you badly misunderstand at least two of them, I'm afraid. (They can cooperate at different levels and human agents can switch around between implementing each of them, but on a theoretical level I don't think this works.)

I think I am misunderstanding something in your position, since it seems to me that you don't seem to disagree with consequentialism in that we need to calculate, but rather in what the terminal values are (with utilitarianism saying utility is the only terminal value and you saying hat there are numerous (such as not lying , not stealing not being destructive etc.))

Absolutely not. Did you read Deontology for Consequentialists?

I still don't know what you mean by "emerge from the self", but if I understand the class of thing you're pointing out with the suicide example, I don't think I have any of those.

I agree, but the first VNM axiom doesn't: totality of the preference ordering.

VNM agents are still allowed to be indifferent.

I like Robin Hanson's post about this. Or there's this quote in from Russell and Norvig:

Refusing to act is like refusing to allow time to pass

Is this only a linguistic argument about what to call morality?

You could re-name everything, but if you renamed my deontological rules "fleeb", I would go on considering fleeb to be ontologically distinct in important ways from things that are not fleeb. I'm pretty sure it's not just linguistic.

Is there a reason you prefer to limit the domain of morality?

Because there's already a perfectly good vocabulary for the ontologically distinct non-fleeb things that people are motivated to act towards - "prudence", "axiology".

Is there a concept you think gets lost when all of life is included in ethics (in virtue ethics or utilitarianism)?

Unassailable priority. People start looking at very large numbers and nodding to themselves and deciding that these very large numbers mean that if they take a thought experiment as a given they have to commit atrocities.

Also, could you clarify the idea of obligations, are then any obligations which don't emanate from the rights of another person?

Yes; I have a secondary rule which for lack of better terminology I call "the principle of needless destruction". It states that you shouldn't go around wrecking stuff for no reason or insufficient reason, with the exact thresholds as yet undefined.

Are there any obligations which emerge inherently from a person's humanity and are therefore not waivable?

"Humanity" is the wrong word; I apply my ethics across the board to all persons regardless of species. I'm not sure I understand the question even if I substitute "personhood".

You've said that you will do nothing, rather than violate a right in order to prevent other rights being violated. Yet you also say that people attempting to violate rights waive their rights not to be stopped. Is this rule designed for the purpose of allowing you to violate people's rights in order to protect others? That seems unfair to people in situations where there's no clearly identifiable moustache-twirling villain.

I wish everyone in this thread would be more careful about using the word "right". If you are trying to violate somebody's rights, you don't have "a right not to be stopped". You have your perfectly normal complement of rights, and some of them are getting in the way of protecting someone else's rights, so, since you're the active party, your (contextually relevant) rights are suspended. They remain in effect out of that context (if you are coming at me with a knife I may violently prevent you from being a threat to me; I may not then take your wallet and run off cackling; I may not, ten years later, visit you in prison and inform you that your mother is dead when she is not; etc.).

You have also said that people can waive any of their rights - for example, people waive their right not to have sex in order to have sex, and people waive their right not to be murdered in order to commit suicide. Doesn't this deny the existence of rape within marriage?

That's a good question, but the answer is no. A marriage does not constitute a promise to be permanently sexually available. You could opt to issue standing permission, and I gather this was customary and expected in historical marriages, but you can revoke it at any time; your rights are yours and you may assert them at will. I don't object to people granting each other standing permission to do things and sticking with it if that's how they prefer to conduct themselves, but morally speaking the option to refuse remains open.

Finally, you mention that some actions which do not violate rights are nonetheless "being a dick", and you will act to prevent and punish these acts in order to discourage them. Doesn't this imply that there are additional aspects to morality not contained by "rights"?

No. There's morality, and then there's all the many things that are not morality. Consequentialists (theoretically, anyway) assign value to everything and add it all up according to the same arithmetic - with whatever epicycles they need not to rob banks and kidnap medical test subjects - but that's not what I'm doing. Morality limits behavior in certain basic ways. You can be a huge dick and technically not do anything morally wrong. (And people can get back at you all kinds of ways, and not technically do anything morally wrong! It's not a fun way to live and I don't really recommend it.)

Do you act as a Standard-LessWrong-Consequentialist-Utilitarian™ with regards to Not Being A Dick?

No. Actually, you could probably call me sort of virtuist with respect to dickishness. I am sort of Standard-LessWrong-Consequentialist-Utilitarian™ with respect to prudence, which is a whole 'nother thing.

Hi Anatoly,

Initially it was a shock to my wife, but I took things very slowly as far as dropping practices. This helped a lot and basically I do whatever I want now (3.5 years later). Also transferred my kids to a good public school out of yeshiva. My wife remains nominally religious, it might take another 10 years :)

My kids don's speak Russian - my wife is American-born. I prefer English myself, so I'm not "unhappy" about them not speaking Russian in particular although I'd prefer them to be bilingual in general. They read a bit of Hebrew.

I'm happy to discuss my HFA kid via PM.

From what I know, Chang & Keisler is a bit dated and can create a wrong perspective on what model theorists are researching nowadays. Maybe you should also look at a modern textbook, like the ones from Hodges, Marker or Poizat.

In case So8res wants to try this, I'd be quite curious to see the bullet points.