Non-Anthropocentric Personhood Ethics

Non-anthropocentric personhood ethics is a system of rights based on the qualities of personhood rather than on "humanness". In contrast to the human-racist positions of bioconservatives, technoprogressives adopt a non-anthropocentric system of ethics in order to accommodate non-humans ranging from animals, such as Great Apes, to future post-humans and their cognitive equivalents such as artificial intelligences.

Non-anthropocentric personhood ethics does not assign value to embryos or the brain dead on the basis that they are human. Instead, it values the humans who are alive and actually persons. Additionally, non-anthropocentric ethics extends varying degrees of personhood to non-human entities on the basis of intellectual complexity. Thus, great apes and dolphins for instance would receive some rough moral parity with humans.

From: http://ieet.org/index.php/tpwiki/Non-anthropocentric_personhood_ethics/