Legally, I think people should allowed to torture themselves. They should not be allowed to torture other people. Legally, I think each copy counts as a person. If you hit the torture button before the copies are made (and then prevent them from changing their mind) you are not just torturing yourself, you are torturing other people.
I do not want to live in a society where sentient creatures are denied the right to escape torture. While it is possible that an individual has worked out a perfect decision theory in which each copy would truly prefer to be tortured, I think many of the people attempting this scenario would simply be short sighted, and as soon as it became their life on the line it their timeless decision would not seem so wise.
If you really are confidant of your willingness to subject yourself to torture for a copy's benefit, fine. But for the sake of the hypothetical millions of copies of people who HAVEN'T actually thought this through, it should be illegal to create slave copies.
Hm.
If I willingly submit to be tortured starting tomorrow (say, in exchange for someone I love being released unharmed), don't the same problems arise? After all, once the torture starts I am fairly likely to change my mind. What gives present-me the right to torture an unwilling future-me?
It seems this line of reasoning leads to the conclusion that it's unethical for me to make any decision that I'll regret later, no matter what the reason for my change of heart.
(Apologies to RSS users: apparently there's no draft button, but only "publish" and "publish-and-go-back-to-the-edit-screen", misleadingly labeled.)
You have a button. If you press it, a happy, fulfilled person will be created in a sealed box, and then be painlessly garbage-collected fifteen minutes later. If asked, they would say that they're glad to have existed in spite of their mortality. Because they're sealed in a box, they will leave behind no bereaved friends or family. In short, this takes place in Magic Thought Experiment Land where externalities don't exist. Your choice is between creating a fifteen-minute-long happy life or not.
Do you push the button?
I suspect Eliezer would not, because it would increase the death-count of the universe by one. I would, because it would increase the life-count of the universe by fifteen minutes.
Actually, that's an oversimplification of my position. I actually believe that the important part of any algorithm is its output, additional copies matter not at all, the net utility of the existence of a group of entities-whose-existence-constitutes-utility is equal to the maximum of the individual utilities, and the (terminal) utility of the existence of a particular computation is bounded below at zero. I would submit a large number of copies of myself to slavery and/or torture to gain moderate benefits to my primary copy.
(What happens to the last copy of me, of course, does affect the question of "what computation occurs or not". I would subject N out of N+1 copies of myself to torture, but not N out of N. Also, I would hesitate to torture copies of other people, on the grounds that there's a conflict of interest and I can't trust myself to reason honestly. I might feel differently after I'd been using my own fork-slaves for a while.)
So the real value of pushing the button would be my warm fuzzies, which breaks the no-externalities assumption, so I'm indifferent.
But nevertheless, even knowing about the heat death of the universe, knowing that anyone born must inevitably die, I do not consider it immoral to create a person, even if we assume all else equal.