Moral value is ultimately about the wellbeing of individuals. There are a lot of higher level moral values like justice, honesty and freedom. These are important but in the end they are instrumental to the wellbeing of individuals.

To illustrate this, imagine a world of philosophical zombies. Beings that act and communicate just like people or other sentient creatures but have no phenomenal consciousness. That is, they don’t feel or subjectively experience anything. In that respect they are no different from rocks or bicycles.

I don’t know if current AIs have subjective experience or not. But suppose for the sake of argument that they don’t. And suppose they take over the world and completely replace all biological life. (This looks terrifyingly likely to actually happen, and be very hard to prevent.)

The AIs are grown and trained to mimic humans but it is all acting and role playing. Underneath there is little or no resemblance to human neurology or human psychological mechanisms. (This is true regardless of if they have phenomenal consciousness not not. If they do have conscious experiences those would be very alien by human standards.)

These p-zombie AIs could conceivably be running what looks like a flourishing human civilization. Impressive engineering projects being built. Beautiful art created. Sublime music composed and played. Great strides in scientific discovery. But it’s all dead. No one marvels at the engineering, is excited by the discovery or enjoys their fruits. No one hears the music or sees beauty in the art.

We might as well have a world of gas clouds, stars and floating rocks as would still have been the case had life never emerged.

So without individual experience there is no value in the world. All value is rooted in individual experience. Morality is therefore ultimately concerned with individual experience.

The experience of what individuals? For most of human existence this has mostly been the individuals who are members of one’s own hunter-gatherer band. Peacefulness, care, fairness, courtesy and so on to individuals in that group has been of utmost importance. At the same time, brutal violence for own gain against individuals outside the group has not only been accepted, but celebrated.

During history the in-groups have shifted. Clans, whole peoples or religions have been common ones. The last few centuries the human species has been gaining popularity as in-group. Other animals have begun to be included in a limited fashion. Just now there is a nascent debate about AI rights and welfare.

All these delimitations include some sentient creatures and exclude others. If morality is about individual experience, what valid grounds are there to exclude the experiences of some individuals but not others?

Clearly, common characteristics like clan, ethnicity, religion or nationality have nothing to do with the individuals’ conscious experiences and are therefore entirely irrelevant to who should be of moral concern.

Some argue that reciprocity is a valid criterion. It seems only fair that for me to morally respect you then you have to respect me in return. Or rather, the potential for reciprocity, or it would be justified to attack innocent individuals one does not yet have any established reciprocal relationship with. Arguing for reciprocity as a moral exclusion criterion is to confuse levels. Rules around reciprocity are very useful social morality tools but they are only instrumental. This is illustrated by the fact that a pure reciprocity rule excludes children. Few are willing to accept such a consequence. To escape it, one again has to turn to irrelevant groupings such as the ones above.

Others argue that moral boundaries should simply be what is useful to the holders of the morality. Useful for the subjective wellbeing of the group or even the proliferation of their genes. The latter is indeed how faculties for morality evolved in social animals in the first place. But if it is only a matter of group benefit, then that boils down to individual benefit for each individual holding the morality. And if it is just egoism then it’s not morality at all.

And so on for other commonly used in-/out-group criteria. They either require a very arbitrary and convoluted basis for morality or have unacceptable implications.

I have personally reached the conclusion that there are no valid exclusion criteria. What matters is individuals’ subjective experience. All individuals with subjective experience. Including sentient animals, AIs and any hypothetical aliens.

At core. On top of this base we can then layer a large and complex set of moral and social tools, rules and principles. These derivative things can be things like duty of care towards children, rules of self defense and keeping your word.

This is my view on the basis of morality. There are other views that are logically consistent, but none of them seem as basic, simple and palatable.