Let me ramble a little bit before I get to the point.
Culture-telling words are a marvelous thing.
It says something about the old Romans, for example, that Latin goes to the trouble of having a specific word for the concept of “line them all up and kill every tenth one”.
It probably says something about the Imperials that Eldraeic has a specific word for “one whom my ethics forbid me from killing, but in the knowledge of whose death I would find delight”.
Sadly, ciseflish metaphysical econometrics loses most of its poetry when I attempt to poorly translate it to the Earthican, but if you imagine kicking the cynicism up a notch on “the purpose of some lives appears to be serving as a warning to others”, you can arrive at “some people are just determined to be hate-fucked to death by their own karma”.
In the resulting liminal realm thrives a subculture of gun-runners and other breeds of death-merchants who are happy to sell people what they want, observe as it predictably and fatally blows up in their faces, and smile the happy smile of people who just got paid twice.
And as I believe I noted back here, people who go around being tricksy with contracts are imperiling the reputational assets of much bigger fish, and potentially triggering a process that ends with a new career running a taco cart in energy-being central.
So our takeaway here is that, so far as Imperial society is concerned, these are people who want to engage in simulations of what is, recall, “the most brutal and personal form of slavery” to get their jollies.
(And, no, they don’t care that it’s their instinctive primal species-nature. It’s their primal species nature to treat the universe as clay to build their solipsistic dreams out of and casually obliterate anything that might get in the way. They got over it. These people should too, and that their meta-desires don’t trend in that direction is another mark against them.)
So, y’know, the position they’re starting from here is “these filthy self-defiling slaver-wannabe degenerates should not exist in my universe, and it is only my deep philosophical commitment to doing the Right Thing even when it is not convenient that stands between them and an ambiplasma enema”.
And then you run into the problem with this precise liminal area in ciseflish economic ethics, which boils down to “there are terrible entropists in the universe; it is ethical to sell them the tools to further their own damnation, because they’re already damned and reaping any profit from their regrettable existence is, eo ipso, a victory against Entropy”.
But you’ve got to account for the externalities, and you definitely don’t want to be making those worse.
And in most types of sophont brains, indulging in things you find pleasurable, whether in reality or simulation, carves those pathways deeper. You’re literally making them worse, risking some horrible externalities, and you’re not doing so on a nice, clear pathway that involves them giving you all their money and resources in exchange for ropes to hang themselves with.
This, say your investors, is a problem.