I'm not sure I consider the two scenarios identical, but I'm still struggling to construct a model of identity and the value of life that works under cloning. And ultimately I think the differences are relevant.
But I agree that your version raises some of the same questions, so let's start there.
I agree that there are versions of P and B for which it is in everyone's best interests that the button not be pushed. Again, just to be concrete, I'll propose a specific such example: B = $1, P= -$1,000,000. (I'm using $ here to denote a certain amount of constant-value stuff, not just burning a million-dollar bill.)
To press that button is simply foolish, for the same reason that spending $500,000 to purchase $0.50 is foolish. And I agree that Pavitra's proposal is a foolish choice in the same way.
And I agree that when a sufficiently costly mistake is sufficiently compelling, we do well to collectively eliminate the choice -- take away the button -- from one another, and that determining when that threshold has been met is basically an empirical question. (I mostly think that words like "government" and "society" confuse the issue here, but I don't disagree with your use of them.)
I'm not sure I agree that these aren't ethical questions, but I'm not sure that matters.
So far, so good.
Where the questions of the nature of identity creep back in for me is precisely in the equation of a thousand copies of me, created on demand, with a thousand existing people. It just stops being quite so clear whose interests are being protected, and from whom, and what kinds of social entities are entitled to make those kinds of laws.
I guess the intuition I am struggling with is that we derive our collective right to restrict one another's individual freedom of choice in part from the collective consequences of our individual choices... that if there truly are no externalities to your behavior, then I have no right to interfere with that behavior. Call that the Principle of Independence.
If you exchange N hours of unpleasantness for you for an hour of pleasantness for you, and it all happens inside a black box with negligible externalities... the POI says I have negligible say in that matter. And that seems to scale more or less indefinitely, although at larger scales I start to care about externalities (like opportunity costs) that seemed negligible at smaller scales.
And if what you do inside that black box is create a thousand clones of yourself and set them to mining toothpicks in the Pointlessly Unpleasant Toothpick Mines for twenty years, and then sell the resulting box of toothpicks for a dollar... well, um... I mean, you're insane, but... I guess I'm saying I don't have standing there either.
I'm not happy with that conclusion, but I'm not unhappy enough to want to throw out the POI, either.
So that's kind of where I am.
(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.