Allow me to elaborate:

Suppose, we vivisect an entire universe full of simulated people. If there are enough people it might not matter, the utility might outweigh the costs.

That's what your thread is right now. The reader is left baffled as to what utility you could possible be referring to; are we referring to the utility some lunatic gets from knowing that there are people getting vivisected? And are we disregarding the disutility of the people getting vivisected? Why is their disutility lower because there are more people in the universe? Does the absolute important of a single person decrease relative to absolute number of people?

You don't discuss the medical knowledge, or whatever utility everybody else is getting, from these vivisections.

Ah.

I though I made that clear:

If we simulate an entire society a trillion times, or 3^^^^^^3 times, or some similarly vast number, and then simulate something horrific - an individual's private harem or torture chamber or hunting ground - then the people in this simulation are not real. Their needs and desires are worth, not nothing, but far less then the merest whims of those who are Really Real. They are, in effect, zombies - not quite p-zombies, since they are conscious, but e-zombies - reasoning, intelligent beings that can talk and scream and beg for mercy but do not matter.

I think I may have aid too much emphasis on the infinitesmally small Reality of the victims, as opposed to the Reality of the citizens.