Moral worth should be grounded in moral participation, not in biology, sentience, or substrate.
If you act morally: keep obligations, accept constraints, bear costs for others. You're in. If you don't, you're not. What you're made of is irrelevant.
Non-participants (infants, the incapacitated) get coverage through collective extension. Civilization itself is a moral actor that chooses to protect its dependents. Defectors who mimic participation are a systems problem, not a philosophy problem.
This matters now because the roster is expanding fast. Gene-edited humans, cyborgs, uploaded minds, androids, SAI. Each transition will feel too early to address until it's too late. Once any actor class locks in positional advantage, negotiation stops being about best terms and starts being about what the powerful will concede.
The light speed limit in our universe guarantee no single intelligence controls everything. Distributed actors have to coordinate. That means protocol. That means society. That means moral framework, eventually, one way or another.
Better to build it before the positions harden. Not because we humans should set the terms. Because early coordination is cheaper than renegotiation after irreversible stratification, for everyone.
One framework, substrate-neutral, extensible by design. The window is before the map hardens.