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Broggly comments on Lifeism, Anti-Deathism, and Some Other Terminal-Values Rambling - Less Wrong
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This is one of those statements where I set out to respond and just stare at it for a while, because it is coming from some other moral or cognitive universe so far away that I hardly know where to begin.
Copies are people, right? They're just like you. In this case, they're exactly like you, until your experiences start to diverge. And you know that people don't like slavery, and they especially don't like torture, right? And it is considered just about the height of evil to hand people over to slavery and torture. (Example, as if one were needed; In Egypt right now, they're calling for the death of the former head of the state security apparatus, which regularly engaged in torture.)
Consider, then, that these copies of you, who you would willingly see enslaved and tortured for your personal benefit, would soon be desperately eager to kill you, the original, if that would make it stop, and they would even have a motivation beyond their own suffering, namely the moral imperative of stopping you from doing this to even further copies.
Has none of this occurred to you? Or does it truly not matter in your private moral calculus?
The "it's okay to kill copies" thing has never made any sense to me either. The explanation that often accompanies it is "well they won't remember being tortured", but that's the exact same scenario for ALL of us after we die, so why are copies an exception to this?
Would you willingly submit yourself to torture for the benefit of some abstract, "extra" version of you? Really? Make a deal with a friend to pay you $100 for every hour of waterboarding you subject yourself to. See how long this seems like a good idea.
To my mind the issue with copies is that it's copies who remain exactly the same that "don't matter", whereas once you've got a bunch of copies being tortured, they're no longer identical copies and so are different people. Maybe I'm just having trouble with Sleeping Beauty-like problems, but that's only a subjective issue for decision making (plus I'd rather spend time learning interesting things that won't require me to bite the bullet of admitting anyone with a suitable sick and twisted mind could Pascal Mug me). Morally, I much prefer 5,000 iterations each of two happy, fulfilled minds than 10,000 of the same one.
Where "Copies" is used isomorphically with "Future versions of you in either MWI or similar realist interpretation of probability theory", then I would certainly subject some of them to torture only for a very large potential gain and small risk of torture. "I" don't like torture, and I'd need a pretty damn big reward for that 1/N longshot to justify a (N-1)/N chance or brutal torture or slavery. This is of course assuming I'm at status quo, if I were a slave or Bagram/Laogai detainee I would try to stay rational and avoid fear making me overly risk averse from escape attempts. I haven't tried to work out my exact beliefs on it, but as said above if I have two options, one saving a life with certainty and the other having a 50% chance of saving two, I'd prefer saving two (assuming they're isolated ie two guys on a lifeboat).
tl; dr, it's a terrible idea in that if you only have the moral authority to condemn copies
Is your last sentence missing something? It feels incomplete.
Ah yes, I meant to type that you only have the moral authority to condemn copies to torture or slavery if they're actually you, and it's pretty stupid to risk almost certain torture for a small chance of a moderate benefit