I would submit a large number of copies of myself to slavery and/or torture to gain moderate benefits to my primary copy.
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.
(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.