Ethical Individualism: The Relational Philosophy

The Center for Human Equality in Oregon exists to conserve and advance a foundational truth of both human dignity and the American experiment: every human being is created equal in value and is a unique individual endowed with unalienable rights.

We promote Ethical Individualism—the human relational philosophy McAlmond developed and articulated in his book Ethical Individualism: A Human Relational Philosophy—as the most coherent and morally sound framework for how people should relate to one another. It directly counters the destructive patterns of group judgmentalism, whether expressed as antisemitism, racism, or any other form of collective stereotyping and blame, while remaining fully consistent with the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that all are “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

Ethical Individualism rests on interlocking axioms about human nature. Every human life possesses equal and infinite worth: no person’s intrinsic value can be ranked above or below another’s, and no life is expendable for the sake of a collective goal, statistical average, or ideological project. Every human being is absolutely unique and never repeatable—a singular mosaic of experiences, choices, temperament, and potential that has never existed before and will never exist again.

In fuller formulations, this is joined by the recognition of infinite mystery: no ideology, science, or observer can exhaustively define or master another person’s inner reality. From these axioms follows a clear moral theorem: any judgment of a human being based primarily on group membership is immoral.

People may be evaluated by their character, actions, and choices; they may not be reduced to representatives of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, class, or any other collective category. There is no collective guilt, only individual responsibility. Diversity is real, but it is the diversity of singular minds and characters, not the sorting of humans into tribes.

This framework is the direct antidote to group judgmentalism. Antisemitism has historically treated Jewish people as a monolithic entity whose members share collective traits, loyalties, or guilt—an approach that enabled the most systematic dehumanization and mass murder of the twentieth century.

Racism operates by the same logic, assigning virtues, vices, or destinies according to skin color or ancestry rather than individual conduct. Whether the groups elevated or condemned shift over time, the underlying error remains the same: the substitution of the category for the person. Ethical Individualism rejects this substitution in all its forms.

It echoes the moral insight later expressed by Martin Luther King Jr.—that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin—while grounding that insight in a consistent relational ethic applicable to every human encounter. By refusing to sort humans into superior or inferior classes, it creates the conditions for mutual respect, trust, and symbiotic relationships rather than perpetual grievance and suspicion.

This philosophy is not an innovation detached from American foundations; it is their relational expression. The Declaration of Independence states as a self-evident truth that all are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

These rights belong to individuals, not to groups or classes. They exist prior to government; the primary purpose of government is to secure them. John Locke’s influence on the Founders is clear: people enter civil society to protect natural rights that they already possess as individuals, and legitimate government remains limited so that it does not subordinate persons to estates, classes, or factions.

The constitutional order that followed was designed to constrain majority power and protect the individual from both private and public forms of coercion. Subsequent reforms—the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise, and the Civil Rights movement—were efforts to more fully realize this horizontal equality of individual rights, not to replace it with group entitlements.

Any ideology that seeks to invert this order by elevating group or class rights above individual rights is incompatible with the founding values of the United States. When political or cultural movements treat people primarily as members of racial, ethnic, sexual, or economic categories—assigning collective privilege, collective guilt, quotas, or differential rights—they abandon the Declaration’s premise.

They convert equal individual protection under law into a contest of group claims, in which the unique person disappears behind the label. Such approaches recreate the hierarchies and tribalisms that the American founding sought to leave behind. They are un-American not because they are novel or unpopular, but because they reverse the foundational logic that rights attach to persons, that government exists to secure those rights, and that no person may be reduced to a representative of a collective.

Americanism, properly understood, expands the conditions for individual flourishing through limited government, secure private property, and free markets; it does not subordinate individuals to engineered group outcomes.

Ethical Individualism is therefore the best human relational philosophy for preserving both human dignity and the American inheritance.

It is practical: by encountering each person as a unique individual of equal worth, it builds trust and makes cooperative, win-win relationships possible.

It is morally rigorous: it forbids the dehumanizing shortcuts of stereotyping and collective judgment while still allowing accountability for actual conduct.

It is consistent with the Declaration’s equal creation and unalienable individual rights, and it rejects as un-American any attempt to replace that emphasis with group or class rights.

In a time of renewed tribalism, the Center for Human Equality advances Ethical Individualism so that Americans may once again meet one another as equal individuals—created equal, uniquely themselves, and protected in their rights by a government whose first duty is precisely that protection.