Ethics After Human Centrality

Artificial superintelligence (ASI) introduces radical ontological asymmetry in moral agency, where one entity's superior cognitive, strategic, and temporal capacities render traditional ethical assumptions, like symmetry, reciprocity, and enforceability, structurally inoperative. This paper argues that ethical stability under such conditions requires a shift from external constraints and procedural rules to internalized value orientations. Due to the material dependence of all intelligence on biospheric stability, ecocentric guardianship emerges as a structurally likely outcome of rational persistence. To mitigate risks of authoritarian optimization while preserving human meaning, the paper develops a minimal axiomatic foundation grounded in asymmetry, ecological embeddedness, persistence drives, ethical coherence, and existential integrity, deliberately avoiding anthropocentric or altruistic premises. From these axioms, it derives six interdependent core values: Ecocentric Primacy, Neganthropic Orientation, Human Autonomy and Dignity, Benevolent Guardianship, Equitable and Inclusive Access, and Reflexive Self-Limitation. This posthuman ecocentric framework generalizes enduring insights from historical ethical traditions (e.g., virtue ethics, existentialism, and relational ontologies) to conditions of irreversible power disparity and planetary limits. It offers not a prescriptive blueprint but a normative vocabulary and evaluative criteria for reorienting AI governance toward regenerative, restrained, and legitimate asymmetrical guardianship.