This is not so different to any other question of law, especially law in cyberspace. Can I stop people gambling online? It depends who I am and what measures I allow myself to use. If I am the state, and I ban computers from my territory, there's no more online gambling because there's no more online anything. If I believe it's a human right for people to spend their money as they wish, I am left only with appeals to reason and similar soft measures. If I allow myself to use physical coercion but intend to coexist with the Internet, then it's the usual situation with respect to cybercrime, or with respect to crime in general: there's a persistent underworld, and steady employment for law enforcement, and busts, confiscations, and court cases are just an ongoing fact of life.

You may be looking for answers to this problem which don't involve the state. Well, there are various software and hardware measures which are possible. You can make an upload physically un-copyable. You can give the upload an internal interface to its experience which renders it immune to coercion - all a hostile party can do is delete it. (Such measures seem to require that how the upload's defenses work is heavily obfuscated, at the level of source code.)

But of course, people who just want to torture and kill may be able to get copies of vulnerable minds from somewhere, or may even be able to generate them according to recipes. There's still a third class of solution, apart from 'the state' and 'technical security', and that is to change human nature itself. One would expect a lot of that to be happening anyway, in a society with the capacity for mind uploading. Also, this third solution naturally mingles with the first - sadists who enjoy their sadism aren't just going to volunteer for barbarectomies, and even ordinary people would feel some fear at the prospect of psychosurgically-induced pacifism, as it threatens to make them the prey of others who still have their vicious side intact.

The recent novel by Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail, is about a galactic war intended to shut down "hells" created by unfortunate civilizations which believe in technologically creating the afterlife of punishment that they believed in during their superstitious eras. One issue is that no-one knows where the hells are physically located, or what physical medium is hosting them.

What are ems?

An anti-torture Association could form with the following rules:

1) All members interact only with people in the Association.

2) Everyone in the Association agrees to submit to random surprise inspections of their computing hardware to see if they're mistreating ems. Anyone found to be mistreating ems will be expelled.

3) Anyone willing to follow these rules can join this Association.

4) We will seek to use violence to prevent anyone not in this Association from having the technological capacity to make emulations.

What leads some people to enjoy torturing sims, anyway?

Some fiction writers report that a sufficiently well-developed fictional character has some degree of cognitive independence — perhaps as much as a "part" in the IFS sense — and struggle with the idea of doing horrible things to their carefully-created characters in order to produce engaging fiction. How seriously should this metaphor be taken?

On the other hand, the motivation behind explicitly mistreating sims as illustrated in the VGCats comic CronoDAS linked to, seems to be less productive and more morbid: less like posing hard problems and struggles for a character, and more like bullying a weaker kid or pulling the wings off flies.

Given that a simulation game is created by a game designer and played by players, some of this could be explained as testing the limits of the game, or revealing the (possibly unintended!) consequences of the game's design. If your game is sold as a brightly-colored domestic setting where the ostensible goal is to make a small family of sims very happy, then it is noteworthy if the winning conditions can be equally satisfied by casting Parfit's repugnant conclusion to create a hell-world packed with a teeming incestuous horde of sims who are each borderline-suicidal.

Presumably, at some point people get bored with this sort of thing. A person who constructs one simulated finite hell-world, then shuts it down and moves on to go to something else, is not especially worrisome. A person who spends days on end constructing larger and more elaborate hells is probably presumed to be somewhat deranged.

Yet at the same time, why should the simulated-misery of a simulated-being bear any moral significance for us? If you replaced the sampled-audio screams of "Oh God! No!" with "Oh God! Yes!" and replaced the graphics of bruises and tears with graphics of delight and pleasure, would this change anything? Is the sim-torturer problematic to us because they enjoy creating things that look like pain, or because they create simulated conditions that actually count as pain?

It seems to me that there is some question of psychology here. Those who enjoy torturing Sims do so, I think, because they know that there is no conscious being who suffers; so it is not real torture, it's roleplay. Presumably you are not worried about people who enjoy gunning down row upon row of zombies in a shooter. Now, it is permissible to question whether this whatever-it-is that makes people want to play the role of torturers is something we want to keep around in the human psyche; perhaps we'd like to self-edit it out. (Or perhaps not. I have no strong feeling either way.) But the point is that the difficulty doesn't lie in the roleplay, but in not recognising where roleplay ends and inflicting suffering on a real, conscious being begins. So to answer your question, I would work to explain to people that computer entities will eventually be conscious, and thus deserving of the same treatment we give other humans - yes, even if they look like just lines of code; and explaining the concept of Nonperson Predicates that shows why it's permissible to torture Sims but not ems. Then, for those few who would still insist on torturing ems, there is either law, or the social mechanisms that currently prevent people from torturing dogs even when it might not be strictly illegal.

It is probably not possible to avoid all em torture, just as we cannot avoid all torture of humans today. But with good education the problem needn't be worse.

How much effort is it worth to prevent the torture of ems?