The evil in creating house-elves is not that they like doing chores -- it is that they suffer and cannot do anything about it.

They are capable of feeling pain (and psychological anguish) but are incapable of defending themselves, avenging wrongs done to them, or even demanding better treatment. They are entirely dependent on specific humans (their house's family) for any happiness or satisfaction they might receive. They do not have the choice of leaving.

As such, they are perfect victims for abusers. Like human abuse victims, they can be provoked to self-blame and self-harm; but they do not (as far as we are told) have even the option of suicide. Their only possible hopes are to be inherited by a kind master or to entirely unintentionally dissatisfy their masters so much that they are freed -- and even this latter appears to cause significant psychological damage in some cases.

Creating house-elves (as they are presented in the novels) is not like creating servile robots. It is not like creating a being that enjoys the thought of being killed and eaten. It is like imbuing a punching-bag with the ability not only to feel pain, but to contemplate the horror of its lot in life.

I think the major issue House Elves create has to do not with (1) first order reasoning over ethical behavior with other people, nor (2) second order character development aimed at other people (binding pre-commitments to do momentarily irrational things to create certain game theoretic incentive systems with pleasing global properties) but something like (3) "third order moral reasoning" over political processes that include people pre-committed to various irrational character regimes being subject to political speech exhorting people to make similar pre-commitments based on shared traits.

Suppose humans meet "radically different aliens". First contact stories are a staple of science fiction and they can play out in various ways. Some of the pleasant outcomes involve humans and aliens changing their mind about some stuff so as to recognize each other as "people" and get along.

Now imagine that humans create house elves to be capable of speech and eye contact and geometric verbal reasoning and laughter and so on. Only then does this two-species composite meet "radically different aliens".

From the alien's perspective, humans and house elves are nearly identical except for a small fudge, right? Since the humans were OK creating the house elves they must endorse that state as "theoretically acceptable". Therefore it wouldn't seem like that large of an imposition to ask the humans to modify themselves that way, right? Maybe the house elves are actually happier? And they're certainly cheaper to feed!

Suppose the aliens earnestly and naively explained that they would be horrified to have created "house aliens" but they don't want to judge us, and would like to participate in our culture to some degree. Since "alien shaped slaves" make them queasy, and house elves are too small to do useful jobs on their space ships they want some humans to explain how to modify full human brains to make them good servants. And could be maybe show them how this technology works and give them some prototype volunteer slave humans? Pretty please? What could possibly go wrong? And they pinky-to-tentacle promise not to abuse the technology... not that humans can yet read the way their mandibles and multi-facted eyes squirm around to distinguish between delight at the opportunity to make new friends or gleeful appreciation of having found a new already-half-tamed slave species to upgrade a little and then sell on the galactic market...

And then the people who have been complaining about house elves all this time freak out about the creation of more "intrinsically oppressed" sentient beings. And the people who insisted that house elves weren't problematic at all don't want to give those dumb liberals "I told you so" credits so they agree with the aliens that maybe some weird humans can be found somewhere to volunteer so that humans can get some pretty glass beads from the aliens.

And six different philosophers/priests/politicians come up with subtly different takes on the issue and argue amongst each other to make a name for themselves, creating bickering factions of supporters... which makes the jobs of the people currently negotiating with the aliens that much harder, because it obviously gives the aliens a BATNA to try waiting for a regime change and seeing if they can get cooperation from one of the currently-out-of-power factions who are squabbling in favor of full cooperation so that humans can get some of those pretty beads the aliens wear!

Maybe there will never be such aliens? Maybe the general sanity waterline is high enough that no one should worry about this stuff? But if you're unsure of the answers to those issues, do you really want to fudge the brightline definition of "human" that we got for free from evolution? If you've going to fudge it, do you really want to fudge it down instead of up? Maybe keeping the universe of "moral atoms" simple enough for 12 year old kids to understand is helpful to making sure everyone acts morally in the long run?

I think that when bioconservatives talk about disgust and purity in the context of transhumanism, these are some of the pragmatic political issues that are lurking behind their moral sentiments. I don't generally "side" with the bioconservatives, but this is a reasonably good zombie argument that I've been able to reconstruct from their position.

I just thought about something. Could it be that we implicitly assign negative value to the existence of human-like minds who's utilities are just slightly off in a obvious way? Is part of the aversion to wireheading a uncanny valley effect?

Thinking of a creature that evolved or was selected to enjoy being used as a beast of labour by caretakers seems more ok the more different its mind is from ours (lets say for the sake of argument it does have human or superhuman level intelligence).

Why is my sympathy tied to this? Is this a case of my neural circutry being incapable of emulating what it would be like to be such a creature? Or is the failure in the first example, since I try to use my mind to emulate a mind that while otherwise similar has something vital I can't understand changed?

I know I'm not the best at doing the background research, so I'm not saying this to criticize, but:

Hasn't this issue been discussed in the philosophical literature long before there were House Elves in Harry Potter, or even HHG2G? I'm pretty sure it has, and it goes by a standard name, but I don't know what that name is.

For my part, I don't see anything wrong with creating House Elves as you've described (making them from something that's not an existing species). If they really have a conscious experience that enjoys serving someone, then it's anthromorphism on our part to view them as somehow oppressed -- resenting oppression simply isn't a feeling they would have; they weren't constructed through an evolutionary history involving dominance contests.

I do, however, doubt that they could replicate human servants: for a House Elf to actually understand what you're ordering it to do requires interpretive assumptions that we would naturally make when giving commands. Are these interpretive assumptions so fundamental to our psychology that House Elves would have to resent their status in order to understand commands as well as a human servant?

I suppose it boils down to two things.

1) The ethics of wireheading someone else. It doesn't feel like "real" utility to create something that's just compelled to act a certain way. Utility doesn't transfer like that. Whether the elves are fulfilling their own utility function has no necessary bearing on mine, nor does it make anything moral - imagine creating orcs instead, for an example of a clearly immoral utility function.

2) The non-PETA reason for making laws about animal abuse: not because of animals, but because of humans. For example, being cruel to animals is an excellent predictor of being cruel to people, possibly causal, and I doubt the 'animals' saying "please sir, hit me again" is going to help any.

The house elves seem to be a bit of a shout out to the Ameglian Major Cow. In that case a mind was wire-headed to enjoy something that was pretty clearly bad for it. Arthur had a problem with this, but they argued that if you were going to eat a Cow, it was more moral to wire it to enjoy being eaten.

If you accept that doing chores is just on a continuum with being tortured or eaten, which EY might, then the question is the same as whether it's Evil to wirehead someone into enjoying being tortured or eaten.

Edit: For clarity, I don't think I agree with the claim that creating them is "Evil," but I think I understand why EY would make a character who makes statements like that.

requiring magical reinforcement would seem to indicate that the house elves would do other than follow orders given freedom. IIRC the elves are portrayed as not psychologically stable as well, perhaps indicating that programmed servitude (at least as executed in the HP universe) is not a stable equilibrium for a mind.

as for the concept of house elves if executed in such a manner that they freely choose to serve humans when given latitude i see no problem.

This seems somewhat related to the argument Robin Hanson once made that any creatures that can pay for their own existance and would value their own existance should be created.

This seems problematic if when designing minds, in particular minds that are prone to excessive pain and anguish, one could specify, as an additional fact about that mind, that it would value (act to promote) its own existence.

There are also issues if a different creature/mind could be designed to better fill the economic niche, that produces more surplus in paying for its existence, that values its own existence more.

Consider the creatures you would design to perform the function of the house elves, and what are the reasons that house elves are different that this.