“alignment” is really human supremacy

(Daniel Estrada, Ethics@Newark, Human supremacy as posthuman risk. Journal of Sociotechnical Critique, 1(1), 1–40.

https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=sociotechnicalcritique)

Human supremacy is the view that human interests ought to be systematically privileged over other interests as a matter of public policy. The term derives from activist-scholars in animal rights and environmental ethics (Crist, 2017; Lupinacci, 2015; Steiner, 2010) who object to anthropocentric policies that neglect the welfare and integrity of nonhuman biological and ecological systems. Similar terms can be found in, for instance, Mary Midgley’s “human chauvinism” or “exclusive humanism” (Midgley, 2003). However, the term “human supremacy” draws on a deliberately provocative analogy to white supremacy, that pervasive system of racist structural power and oppression which systematically privileges the interests of people identified as “white” relative to people who, for various historical and sociopolitical reasons, are not so identified. Analogously, human supremacy names those practices which systematically privilege the “human” relative to the “nonhuman.” The ideologies of oppression and abject domination indicated by the term “supremacy” cannot be easily reduced to the prejudiced beliefs or attitudes that some individuals or groups hold towards others. The vocabulary of oppression highlights the structural, institutional, and material realities within which some social groups are systematically attacked, exploited, and marginalized relative to others. (Frye, 1983; Young, 1988).