Typically (in fact, I would venture to say universally) in human societies, certain levels of value are attributed to different forms of life. There is no question that value is subjective. That is to say, that nothing actually "has" value in and of itself, it can only ever "be" valued. There is however an over-arching culturally perpetuated way of ranking the value of things, on top of the inter-subjective trends in how people value things that are almost universal across cultures. How then do humans value life both as individuals and as societies and how does that match up with what is actually rational to value or disvalue?Humans pretty much always claim that humans are the most valuable form of life. To the unbiased, this would seem on the surface to be pure unfounded self-importance. It is actually highly rational in it's own way though, at least as far as human society is concerned in a type-0, human supremacy context wherein no beings of equal intelligence rival them, because fundamentally valuing human life above all else creates a social contract which benefits humans mutually and helps facilitate their cooperation with each other. But how is it "objectively" rational in the sense that it would fit into, and actually be true for a universal inter-societal value system that would work even in an intergalactic civilization context? It wouldn't, because if they used human logic every single civilization would think their species is inherently more valuable than every other and their would never be true peace, cooperation or unity.
Humans are a race of Nazis, vegans often say "we are civilized beings, we don't have to act like predatory animals" but they have it completely backwards. Humans are far worse than a lion which merely harms other lifeforms to survive, humans have a literal supremacist ideology to how they systematically prey upon, subjugate, claim to "own", abuse and wrecklessly destroy other lifeforms and the ecosystem for their own gain. What makes it worse is that despite what I stated above, it is only rational in a very short-term sense and the logic behind it is actually very stupid once you truly begin trying to justify it logically. The only way to logically justify this mentality is if you become completely amoral, assume that the most superficially selfish route is always best and assume that there must always be conflict and competition between lifeforms in general.
If you were to assume these things, then every individual would extend this mentality to other humans. In other words it would be pure philosophical selfishness, and the idea that "human life" in and of itself is what matters would be negated by the fact that each individual only fundamentally cares about themselves which would mean humanity is collectively admitting that the idea that they are all-important is pure subjective self-importance and that they only create inter-subjective social constructs which value human life to prevent everyone from murdering each other. There is also the claim that humans are more valuable and/or have a sort of "right of conquest" because they are on a higher level of consciousness. Does that mean the life-value of a human who is mentally handicapped should be diminished to differing degrees based on how retarded they are compared to fully-functioning humans, or that an extraterrestrial species that is vastly more intelligent would have the moral right to colonize earth and exterminate us? The average person would try to back out of this and deny it's logical consistency, but the fact of the matter is it illustrates the logical inconsistency of valuing human life above others due to their level of intelligence while also claiming this value stems from morality/compassion rather than pure utilitarian inter-subjective self-importance.
The fact of the matter is that there IS no value, of literally anything, like I stated in the first paragraph. The other fact of the matter however, is that there are forms of life that are sentient to varying degrees, and somewhere out there in the universe there are species that are more sentient than humans. Even the beings that aren't sentient must be brought into the equation, because without plants for example all animal life would die. In fact, one could extend it to inanimate objects because without the oxygen in the atmosphere, the minerals in the earth, the properties and components of the universe itself, the existence of sentient life would not be facilitated. That being said, it is the humble genius opinion of the great Factual One, The Fact Machine himself, that the more "civilized" you truly are the more you tend to uplift and protect all life, and indeed the universe itself, but when you do not have the means to do so and your own well-being is at stake it is only logical to be a selfish bastard.
