Human Equality of Worth is Difficult

Ethical Individualism is easy to accept as a proposition and difficult to practice as a habit, because it asks a social species to refuse the very move by which groups usually secure loyalty. The philosophy can be stated in a few axioms.

Its keystone is infinite value: every human being has a worth, simply as human, that talent cannot raise and membership cannot lower.

From that status follows the central theorem, that any judgment of a human being based primarily on group membership is immoral. Uniqueness blocks the substitution of the person by the type. Responsibility keeps praise and blame on the chooser. None of this is obscure. In calm discussion almost no one defends the claim that outsiders are a lower grade of human being, or that their own group is a higher one. The obstacle is not comprehension. It is the person to whom the axiom is addressed.

Human beings are built for groups. Kin, tribe, faith, language, nation, and party are ordinary instruments of cooperation, and for most of human history they were conditions of survival. Likeness is noticed quickly. Outsiders are noticed quickly. Trust is cheaper inside the boundary than across it, and shared danger makes the boundary feel like a moral fact.

There is nothing in Ethical Individualism that requires this tendency to be denied. A person may love his own people, prefer his own culture, and defend his own country without asserting that members are worth more as human beings than non-members. The corruption is the extra step. Preference becomes rank. The in-group is treated as the standard human, and the outsider is treated as less of one. That step has been taken often enough to look like human nature itself.

The gain explains the repetition. Unequal human worth simplifies conflict. If the other side is subhuman, restraint looks like weakness and cruelty looks like hygiene. If one’s own side is superhuman, sacrifice of the outsider needs no further justification. Belonging, which was already emotionally strong, is promoted into a status.

The Nazi case is the modern extreme of this promotion, not a separate phenomenon. Nazi ideology did not stop at hostility. It assigned Jews, Slavs, Roma, and others a lower human worth, assigned the so-called Aryan a higher one, and treated the scale as biological truth. Once worth could be raised or lowered by blood, exclusion and killing could be described as the protection of a higher type.

Weaker versions of the same structure do not require a racial state. The heretic, the infidel, the class enemy, the racial other, and the political enemy have all been relocated below the line by communities that would have rejected the principle in the abstract. The myth changes. The request does not. Membership is asked to do what only a non-comparative human worth can forbid.

This is why theory and practice separate.

Infinite value can be granted as an ideal and then abandoned at the moment it costs something. The cost is usually local. It appears when the person to be judged is an enemy of one’s group, or a confirmation of one’s group’s grievance, or a convenient bearer of a stereotype that the group already shares.

Under those conditions the primary group judgment does not feel like a philosophical error. It feels like realism. The axiom has to be remembered against that feeling, which is why acceptance is cheap and performance is not. A stated belief in equal human worth is compatible with flinching into rank as soon as the ranking favors one’s own side. The theorem is violated less often by a treatise on superiority than by a default: this one counts less because of what he is taken to represent.

Older formulations of the same status show both the durability of the ideal and the regularity of the relapse. Genesis places the image of God on mankind before Abraham, Israel, or the church, and Genesis 9 attaches the protection of that image to human blood as such.

The Declaration of Independence ties created equality to unalienable rights, against the idea that some are born to rule and others to be used. Both are horizontal claims. Both were later reread by communities that treated membership as an increase in worth.

Election became a higher grade of humanity. Religious belonging became a reason the outsider mattered less. Political equality became equality for one’s own kind. The texts did not authorize the rereading. The social incentive did.

Ethical Individualism’s secular keystone is aimed at that incentive directly. It does not derive equal worth from creation or from endowment, but it assigns the worth the same role: a status prior to the groups people join, and unavailable for tribal promotion.

The difficulty is increased by a necessary distinction the philosophy itself insists on. Human worth is equal. Moral worth is not. Character, courage, honesty, and achievement may be higher or lower, and judging them by group membership is precisely what the theorem forbids. In practice the two lines are easy to collapse.

Criticism of a group’s conduct is heard as a denial of its members’ humanity, or defense of equal human worth is heard as a denial that anyone may be judged. Ethical Individualism requires both lines to be held at once. The vertical estimate of conduct stays open. The horizontal estimate of human status stays closed. Tribal conflict prefers to open the second whenever the first becomes heated. It is simpler to call the enemy less than human than to call his acts wrong while leaving his worth untouched.

Nothing in the philosophy suggests that the tribal tendency will be retired.

Fellow-feeling is reliably stronger inside the group, and it will keep offering members a superiority the axiom says does not exist. Infinite value is an axiom rather than a mood for that reason. It will not be sustained by sympathy, which thins at the boundary. It has to be applied where sympathy is weakest: in the particular encounter, against the available stereotype, when the group’s estimate is already formed.

Theory can be settled in a sentence. Practice is the repeated refusal to let membership move anyone off the line. That refusal cuts against a social species at the point where the species is most itself. The ideal is easy because it is clear. It is hard because clarity is not what group loyalty is for.