I consider it self-evident that Sam_sunday should be allowed to arrange for Sam_monday to be tortured without the ability to make it stop, and by the same token Sam_monday should be allowed to do the same thing to Sam_tuesday_x.
I reject the premise. Why should it be self-evident that Sam_sunday should be allowed to arrange for Sam_monday to be tortured? Doesn't this seem like something people only came up with because of the illusion of subjective anticipation?
EDIT: I just read what you wrote in a different comment on this post:
I don't actually care about the avoidance of torture as a terminal moral value.
You statements make sense in light of this. My morality is much closer to classical utilitarianism (is that the term?) and may actually be classical utilitarianism upon reflection. I assumed that you did care about the avoidance of torture as a terminal value, since most LessWrongers do. Torture is often used as a stock example of something that causes disutility so, if you are presenting an argument, you will often need to mention this aspect of your value system in order to bridge inferential distance.
I think that difference accounts for my remaining confusion.
(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.