Ethical Individualism Explained

Russell McAlmond’s Ethical Individualism (also called Ethical Individualism Theory or EIT) is presented as a secular “human relational philosophy.”

Its specific arguments center on a small set of foundational axioms that, once accepted, make group-based moral judgments (what he terms “group judgmentalism” or “groupism”) both factually false and ethically forbidden.

Core Axioms

McAlmond articulates the philosophy through two to four interlocking axioms (the number varies slightly across his writings, but the substance is consistent):

Infinite and equal worth

Every human life possesses infinite value, equal to that of any other human life or any combination of lives. Value is not finite, comparative, or conditional.

There is no moral mathematics that can legitimately rank one life above another or sacrifice one for a “greater” collective good. Infinity cannot be doubled or halved.

Absolute uniqueness

Every human being is absolutely unique and never repeatable. Each person is a singular “mosaic” (or “universe of value”) of experiences, choices, temperament, memories, and potential—a configuration that has never existed before and will never exist again. No two people are identical, even if they share group markers.

Infinite mystery (in expanded versions)

No mind, science, ideology, or relationship can ever fully exhaust or master another person’s inner reality. Every individual remains partially opaque and open-ended.

These axioms are presented as self-evident once stated and mutually reinforcing.

Equal worth prevents hierarchies of value; uniqueness prevents interchangeability; mystery prevents final, totalizing judgments.

Central Theorem

From the axioms McAlmond derives the core claim:

Any judgment of a human being based primarily on group membership is immoral.

Group judgmentalism—the practice of ascribing traits, virtues, vices, guilt, or moral worth to individuals because of their perceived membership in a collective (race, ethnicity, religion, gender, politics, class, etc.)—violates the axioms. It treats a never-repeatable person of infinite worth as if they were interchangeable with others and fully knowable through a category.

This is both a factual error (people within groups are not uniform) and a moral betrayal (of the other person and of one’s own responsibility to encounter them properly).

Key Supporting Arguments

Against collective guilt and collective virtue

Individuals are responsible only for their own actions. There is no such thing as collective guilt (or collective credit) that can be transferred to people who did not personally commit the acts in question. Statements of the form “All [group] are [trait]” are never true and are themselves a form of prejudice.

Deindividuation and dehumanization

Reducing a person to a group label is the first step toward dehumanization. Historically, this process enabled slavery, the Holocaust, genocides, and other atrocities by portraying entire categories as inherently inferior, threatening, or expendable. The same logic appears in modern identity politics, quotas, and tribal polarization.

Distinction between groups and individuals

Groups as organizations or collective entities can be evaluated by their stated purpose and actions (e.g., a criminal gang or a political party can be condemned). Individual members of those groups, however, must still be judged only by their own character and conduct. Membership alone never justifies pre-judgment.

Practical and relational grounding

McAlmond developed the philosophy from his experience as a financial advisor, where treating clients as unique individuals (rather than demographic statistics) produced trust and mutually beneficial outcomes. He links it to the ethical imperative to “love your neighbor” interpreted as radical, non-hierarchical respect. The goal is “symbiotic” (win-win) human relations rather than zero-sum group competition.

Connection to Kant

In some writings McAlmond frames Ethical Individualism as a concrete extension of Kant’s categorical imperative into a “relational imperative”: never reduce a person to a representative of a group; always encounter them as a singular end-in-relation. Equality of worth functions like Kantian dignity, while uniqueness and mystery add content that blocks the reduction of persons to categories.

What the Philosophy Does Not Claim

It does not assert that all individuals are equal in talent, character, effort, or accomplishment. Differences in achievement are real and legitimate. The equal-value axiom applies only to baseline human dignity and the refusal to deny uniqueness or assign collective moral status. It is not a call for equal outcomes or the erasure of cultural or personal differences—only a refusal to let those differences define or diminish any person’s inherent worth as an individual.

In McAlmond’s view, once the axioms are granted, group judgmentalism becomes not merely unwise or outdated but rationally and morally incoherent. The philosophy is offered as a direct antidote to antisemitism, racism, and other forms of collective prejudice precisely because those phenomena depend on the forbidden reduction of unique persons to group stereotypes.