Discrimination
Discrimination is the mechanism any collection of matter, energy, or information uses to maintain its existence. Those collections, including us, exist on a spectrum from fully self sufficient to fully dependent. On one end is the being who can conjure anything into existence with a thought. They don’t need anything from anything else, so everything else in the universe is exactly equal to them, exactly as useful or useless, beautiful or ugly. On the other end is something that never gets anything they need without it being gifted or taken. That being needs to discriminate whenever possible so it can try to surround itself with things it can take from or who will gift it the things it needs.
As time goes on, humans are moving from the latter to the former. That comes with certain responsibilities to be less discriminatory, which explains why we should do things like eat less meat or avoid killing bugs. We have to always consider the cost and benefit another being is providing. At some point in the past, bugs corrupted our food sources or spread disease, but a house centipede is probably giving us more by being a living being here with us on this planet that doesn’t owe us anything than it is costing us by asking us to look at something ugly for a second. And if we don’t consider that cost when we are capable, it would be reasonable to expect something else will consider it and count that distance from the optimal against us.
On the other hand, we aren’t perfect gods yet. Any time we don’t discriminate when we could, we are exposing ourselves to exploitation. When a slave doesn’t question their master or a person doesn’t fully consider whether the requests on their time are mutually beneficial, they are placing trust in that request and requester that it has a higher intelligence. Sometimes that will be the case and sometimes it won’t, so we are burdened with the meta discrimination of deciding what sources should trigger discrimination. We also have to be careful not the give up that meta decision to societal or other forces when we have the excess resources available to us to tolerate mistakes.