ethical individualism and infinite values

The 20th century demonstrated, with a thoroughness no previous age could rival, what happens when human beings are ranked, categorized, or presumed fully knowable.

The death camps, the Gulag, the killing fields, and the quiet sterilizations of the unfit all shared the same underlying logic: some lives were declared more valuable than others, or reducible to a type, or transparent to the eye of power and therefore disposable.

Against that nightmare, Rabbi Russell McAlmond has erected a moral fortress whose walls are made of three inseparable infinities. Ethical Individualism does not ask for faith, tradition, or utilitarian calculation.

It rests on three axioms so stark that no ideology has ever been able to live alongside them without disintegrating:

Every human life possesses infinite value, equal to the value of any other human life or any combination of lives. 

Every human life possesses infinite uniqueness; no individual can ever be substituted, replicated, or adequately represented by another or by a category. 

Every human life possesses infinite mystery; no mind, science, ideology, or relationship will ever exhaustively know or master the inner reality of another person.

These are not pious hopes. They are philosophical axioms—self-evident once stated, and lethal to every form of dehumanization once accepted.

First Axiom: Infinite Value

There is no moral mathematics that can place one life on a scale opposite two, or a thousand, or a million. Infinity cannot be doubled, and it cannot be halved. The moment a theory claims that the “higher” life of a Napoleon, a Führer, a vanguard party, or a master race outweighs the lives of the “ordinary,” the theory has already performed an impossible operation: it has made infinity finite. Infinite value destroys every justification for deliberate harm.

It is not sentimental; it is ruthless. It tells the revolutionary that the radiant future is worthless if it is purchased with a single innocent death. It tells the eugenicist that no genome is precious enough to cancel the infinity of the “defective.” It tells the terrorist that no cause, however noble in their eyes, can survive the deliberate subtraction of even one infinite.

Second Axiom: Infinite Uniqueness

If the first axiom is vertical (no one above, no one below), the second is horizontal (no one beside). Collectivism—whether racial, national, religious, or ideological—survives by convincing its adherents that individuals are interchangeable tokens of a larger reality: the Volk, the Class, the Ummah, the Race, the Revolution.

Infinite uniqueness burns that illusion to the ground. There has never been, and never will be, another you. Your precise constellation of memories, wounds, hopes, fears, loves, and private meanings is unrepeatable at the level of galaxies. To treat a person as an exemplar of their group is already to commit a category error of cosmic proportions. Stereotypes, quotas, blood libels, and class enemies all collapse when confronted with the simple fact that no human being is a sample size.

Third Axiom: Infinite Mystery

Here the fortress acquires its deepest moat. Even the first two infinities, powerful as they are, have historically been twisted by one last arrogance: the claim to complete knowledge. “We know what the Jew is.” “We have unmasked the bourgeois.” “Science has revealed the criminal type.” Once the other is believed to be fully transparent—once the veil is supposedly torn away—violence becomes a mere technical act of hygiene.Infinite mystery is the permanent admission of humility.

It declares that every human horizon recedes forever. The more intimately you know someone, the more you discover oceans of interiority still uncharted. No psychology, no algorithm, no confession extracted under torture, no brain scan, no historical law will ever deliver the final secret of a person. To act as if it has is the primal sin of every inquisitor and every secret police.

When the third axiom is in force, judgmentalism becomes not only immoral but absurd. You cannot condemn what you cannot fully comprehend. The door to fanaticism slams shut.

The Practical Force of the Three Infinites

Taken together, the axioms generate an ethic that is astonishingly concrete:

You may never intentionally harm another person, because their value is infinite. 

You may never reduce them to their group, because their uniqueness is infinite. 

You may never presume to have the final verdict on who they are, because their mystery is infinite.

The result is a relational posture of radical respect, permanent openness, and symbiotic trust. McAlmond calls this “human relational living”: approaching every encounter as an unrepeatable meeting between two infinities, each bearing infinite value, infinite uniqueness, and infinite mystery.

The only thing that can emerge from such an encounter is mutual enrichment, never domination or erasure.

Ethical Individualism is not one more noble ideal competing in the marketplace of philosophies. It is the philosophical equivalent of a logical contradiction injected into the heart of every totalitarian temptation. Once the three infinities are granted, the Napoleon’s right to step over corpses, Hitler’s hierarchy of blood, Stalin’s sacrifice of the present generation for the future, and every quieter form of contempt all become literally unthinkable.

The 20th century showed us the abyss that opens when human beings are ranked, categorized, or presumed known. Ethical Individualism answers with a vision so simple and so absolute that it leaves no crack for the demons to re-enter: Every human being is infinite in value, infinite in uniqueness, and infinite in mystery.

Everything else—politics, economics, culture, religion—must arrange itself around that fact, or it is already on the road to crime and punishment.