I don't know the difference between reality and illusion, but I do know that status is the key to most human interactions (and now come to think of it, mammals in general. Many birds too. Not too sure about other vertebrates.).
Perhaps you're correct about status but I militate against the idea that any one human being is more valuable than another. Money, fame, glory or whatever else, you're just the same as every other human on the planet. Blood, bones and your shit stinks just like everyone else.
Charlotte's Web aside, the key point isn't whether one being is "worth more" than another, it's whether you can empathize with the other. So while you may not ultimately decide that pigs are worth more than bacon, you can at least imagine what it feels like to be the pig.
(Actually, when I put it that way, it makes me really feel sorry for the cow that I'm about to eat. Unfortunately, I don't feel sorry enough to give up meat.)
Similarly, your actions are just if you can imagine yourself in the shoes of the less intelligent person and still say "I am okay with the world as it is." Many times, people are fine with that - I've never gotten grief for working for Google and having free food, because people know how hard it is to get into Google and understand that if they put as many hours into computer programming as I have, they probably could get in too. But sometimes, if you really put yourself in someone else's shoes, you realize that the world is egregiously unfair, and you can't in good conscience support certain actions.
Questions about character and morals almost always reveal more about the person answering them than about the world. Are more intelligent humans worth more than less intelligent humans? Worth more to whom? God? Judeo-Christian tradition holds that God loves all his children (except maybe the Philistines). You? Then this is a subjective moral question, and says a lot about you but not so much about humans. Each other? They probably have a wide variety of opinions on that.
does it not follow that more intelligent humans are worth more than less intelligent humans?
I've come across a similar line of thinking before (possibly in an ethics class). That time we ended up at something like 'your pet dog is more intelligent/useful than a newborn human. So is it more valuable?' After that, we ended up in a discussion about 'potential' e.g human newborn has more 'potential' than the fully grown dog and so on.
I basically learned that the really interesting thing about such discussions is what it tells you about yourself and the other people.
Perhaps, but its effects are most certainly not. There are only three ways to change the world in a major way; violence, technology, and mass persuasion. Understanding status is a key part of the third...
