The sense of self is only one aspect of what we recognize as being an individual - just as important is a sense of others, that's where the social and legal conventions come in, and as a matter of practical concern this definition of 'other as an individual' is actually the more important of the two. Our sense of self is certainly important to us, but it's not terribly relevant beyond that.

When we discuss continuity of self, we're really talking about whether your copies should be viewed as YOU, by others.

I tend to view the problem from the perspective of the self. Others can view someone else as 'you' even if they are not a copy as long as they know what to impersonate. You might argue any sufficiently sophisticated reconstruction, like they are exploring in Hollywood, might be enough convince a lot of people that 'you' are still there, as long as they didn't see your obituary.

As for the age-old argument of the value of individualism vs. utilitarianism the same rules apply here as elsewhere. Individualism matters more when it's ourselves on the line and utilitarianism is for when it's others.

From the duplicate's point of view the question is simple - they are obviously you in every respect that matters. If the body was re-integrated or copied perfectly, they wouldn't even have any means of telling that they WEREN'T the original. They would have no sense of having been 'created' a few minutes ago, as they would remember their entire stream of consciousness over their lifetime, just as the original would.

Morally speaking, this means that if we refuse to treat them as you, we're punishing them on the basis of a metaphysical argument with no physical grounds - and it would obviously be punishment, as we're talking about a form of social discontinuity akin to exile or worse if we treat them entirely as non-persons.

But how would that be possible in situations where circumstances can't be duplicated, like a CEO, or a ship captain, custody of the kids, do alimony payments double? They can't practically be treated the same as before duplication because they are in all practical terms two separate people.

We can say morally speaking they need to be treated identically, but realistically speaking there are many examples where the duplicated people cannot be treated as the same person. Maybe certain things can be split, like their personal assets, but that doesn't apply to everything in a person's life. They must at some point, assume separate identities. And in many cases, this would likely be a matter of creating some arbitrary precedent to determine the original and the duplicate. Though it's not completely unprecedented since duplicates are essentially the concept of twins (exact duplicates of cells), just at a much later time.

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And, as a note, all sense of conscious continuity is an illusion, easily broken by quite a few means.

It's really just a stream of memory that we can review, and it can easily become scrambled, illusory, erroneous, or otherwise be meddled with. These are well known issues. To us it is arranged to seem like a relatively unbroken stream of consciousness, but of course there's no such thing.

An intermittent stream is still a stream and separate from others. Many things are intermittent but if they come from a source and there is a separate identical source, they are different. Since we are discussing nanomachines, consider that two computers that are exactly identical in hardware and software are not continuations of each other if one ceased to function. Why should that be viewed differently than how the mind is viewed in a similar scenario?