All beings that act as if they were pursuing a goal of (pseudo)-self-replication are also acting as if they were taking non-existing beings' preferences into account (specifically, the preference of their future pseudo-copies to exist once they exist).
I was under the impression that you were arguing here that the goal of self-replication is adequately justified by the "clippiness" of the prospective replica - with the most important component of the property 'clippiness' being a propensity to advance Clippy's values. That is, you weren't concerned with providing utility to the replicas - you were concerned with providing utility to yourself.
My point was that the distinction between "selves" is spurious. Clippys support all processes that instantiate paperclip-maximizing, differentiating between them only only by their clippy-effectiveness and the certainty of this assessment of them.
My point here is that different utility functions can explain a certain class of being's behavior, and one such utility function is one that places value on not-yet-existing beings -- even though the replicator may not, on self-reflection, regard this as the value it is pursuing.
Some people see never-existed people as moral agents, and claim that we can talk about their preferences. Generally this means their personal preference in existing versus non-existing. Formulations such "it is better for someone to have existed than not" reflect this way of thinking.
But if the preferences of never-existed are relevant, then their non-personal perferences are also relevant. Do they perfer a blue world or a pink one? Would they want us to change our political systems? Would they want us to not bring into existence some never-existent people they don't like?
It seems that those who are advocating bringing never-existent people into being in order to satisfy those people's preferences should be focusing their attention on their non-personal preferences instead. After all, we can only bring into being so many trillions of trillions of trillions; but there is no theoretical limit to the number of never-existent people whose non-personal preferences we can satisfy. Just get some reasonable measure across the preferences of never-existent people, and see if there's anything that sticks out from the mass.