At the very least, you should reconsider the syllogism at the heart of your article:
We can substitute in your tentative definition of life:
Premise 2 is an empirical claim. Premise 1 is a moral claim that is strictly stronger than the conclusion, and you do not justify it at all.
If you have moral intuitions or moral arguments for the first premise, then perhaps you should write about those instead. And your arguments ought to make sense without using the word "life". If your argument is along the lines of "well, humans and chimpanzees have ethical value, and they're both self-replicating structures with genomes etc., so it only makes sense that transposons have ethical value too", that's not good enough. You'd have to say why being a self-replicating structure with a genome etc. is the reason why humans and chimpanzees have ethical value. If humans and chimpanzees have ethical value because of some other feature, then perhaps transposons don't share that feature and they don't have ethical value after all.
Hmm. I do understand that, but I still don't think it's relevant. I don't try to argue that Premise 1 is true (except in a throwaway parenthetical which I am considering retracting), rather I'm arguing that Premise 2 is true, and that consequently Premise 1 implies the conclusion ("transposons have ethical value") which in turn implies various things ranging from the disconcerting to the absurd. In fact I believed Premise 1 (albeit without great examination) until I learned about transposons, and now I doubt it (though I haven't rejected it so...
I recently read (in Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale) about the Alu sequence, and went on to read about transposons generally. Having as I do a rather broad definition of life, I concluded that Alu (and others like it) are lifeforms in their own right, although parasitic ones. I found the potential ethical implications somewhat staggering, especially given the need to shut up and multiply those implications by the rather large number of transposon instances in a typical multicellular organism.
I have written out my thoughts on the subject, at http://jttlov.no-ip.org/writings/alulife.htm. I don't claim to have a well-worked out position, just a series of ideas and questions I feel to be worthy of discussion.
ETA: I have started editing the article based on the discussion below. For reference with the existing discussion, I have preserved a copy of the original article as well, linked from the current version.