Superhuman Moral Standing

Human beings matter morally. We have moral standing. Our interests deserve consideration -- for our own sakes, and not just as means to ends. Good ethical decision-making requires valuing human lives. Most philosophers hold that humans have the highest moral standing. No entity matters more, and many matter less. It’s worse to kill a human than a dog or a frog or bacteria or a tree. That humans have the maximum possible moral standing is sometimes encoded in the philosophical jargon, for example when philosophers say that humans have "full moral status". The moral gas-gauge tops out at "full" for us, so to speak. But might some entities have higher moral standing than humans? Futurists envision the possibility of a post-human, transhuman, or superhuman future, or AI systems with superhuman capacities. Might there someday exist entities whose lives are intrinsically more valuable than ours, deserving moral priority over us, just as a human life deserves moral priority over that of a…