Edit: This is old material. It may be out of date.
I'm talking about the fictional race of House Elves from the Harry Potter universe first written about by J. K. Rowling and then uplifted in a grand act of fan-fiction by Elizer Yudkowsky. Unless severely mistreated they enjoy servitude to their masters (or more accurately the current residents of the homes they are binded to), this is also enforced by magical means since they must follow the letter if not the spirit of their master's direct order.
Overall treating House Elves the way they would like to be treated appears more or less sensible and don't feel like debating this if people don't disagree. Changing agents without their consent or knowledge seems obviously wrong, so turning someone into a servant creatures seem intuitively wrong. I can also understand that many people would mind their descendants being modified in such a fashion, perhaps their dis-utility is enough to offset the utility of their modified descendants. However how true is this of distant descendants that only share passing resemblance? I think a helpful reminder of scale might be our own self domestication.
Assuming one created elf like creatures ex nihilo, not as slightly modified versions of a existing species why would one not want to bring a mind into existence that would value its own existence and benefits you, as long as the act of creation or their existence in itself does not represents huge enough dis-utility? This seems somewhat related to the argument Robin Hanson once made that any creatures that can pay for their own existance and would value their own existance should be created.
I didn't mention this in the many HP fan fiction threads because I want a more general debate on the treatment and creation of such a class of agents.
Edit: Clearly if the species or class contains exceptions there should be ways for them to pursue their differing values.
Relevant details:
Peer is not currently ready to be a minion in any kind of stressful environment. Every authority figure he's had so far has been of the 'I won't respect you unless you stand up for yourself' type and not very sane, and as a result of that Peer has some very dysfunctional habits when it comes to interacting with such people. I'm already working on fixing that, but I expect that it will take at least a year before he's able to deal with normal expressions of disapproval in a sane way, voluntarily communicate important information that the recipient might not like, and correctly parse the relative importance of an order given previously which was stated to be very important vs. an order given recently with more emotional weight behind it but no other statement that it's unusually important. I'm confident he'll get there, but it's going to be a while. (This is also why I'm involved at all - the more neurotic aspects of this issue are painful to watch, leading me to want to try to fix it. I'm not sure if I'll turn out to like having a minion around enough to keep one in the long term - it's possible, but I also like living alone. In any case, Peer wants to be working for someone who's actively involved in x-risk prevention, and I'm not.)
We're also going to be working on practical skills; if anyone thinks they'll be interested in taking Peer on when he's done learning how to interact with sane people, it would be good for them to contact me about any skills they think they'd like him to gain. (My plans so far are pretty basic with a geeky twist: Cooking, cleaning, home maintenance, Lojban and/or sign language, computer hardware skills, social skills, organizational skills, etc. Peer already programs.)
Wow. The concept is fascinating.