The Justice Of Individualism

Justice is treating a person as he or she deserves.  Treating different people differently, thus, is just if those people act differently.  That justice entails distinguishing between one individual and another is hardly difficult to establish rationally or Biblically, yet the ramifications to this are enormous.  Since justice might require that one person be treated a certain way and a different person in a another way, it follows that it is unjust to assume something about a person based upon the actions of another person.

Individualism has an ironic relationship with the American public.  On one hand, Americans might be quick to cling to the idea of personal freedom, which is an inescapably individualistic concept.  On the other hand, some of them are also often quick to preemptively judge other people in various ways on the basis of stereotypes, which is intrinsically contradictory to individualism.  The ironies and contradictions of American society are plentiful, so it is not as if these conflicting appeals to individualism and stereotypes form the only inconsistency in American society.  For instance, Americans might also love to decry ignorance, yet they are also often eager to defend stupidity by insisting that "everyone has a right to their own opinion"--a thing that is logically impossible!

I am not committing the very thing I am attacking here, though, as I am not pretending like being born into America necessitates that one will eventually gravitate towards hypocrisies and errors.  No one has to succumb to these ironies and contradictions just by living in the United States.  And it is not as if Americans, unique in time and geography, are the only ones that tend to be stupid.  These errors are all embraced purely from one of two sources, if not both: individual stupidity or societal conditioning.  I do not judge a person from a position of ignorance or assume that the person must be a certain way simply because he or she is an American (or a representative of some other group).

Many people might be tempted to treat stereotypes as quick routes to knowledge about other people--but this is ludicrous, for reason and justice demand that a person must be appraised and judged as his or her own autonomous individual, not judged by association with others, with preconceived notions guiding a conclusion.  People are autonomous, complex, and wildly unique; they will not all merely turn out to be personality clones.  And yet some persist in the fallacious pursuit of assuming things about a person based upon factors like their age, appearance, gender, ethnicity, and multiple other variables too.

Despite all the cultural forces that could motivate the preservation of stereotypes, people remain their own individual selves.  One person does not have to be like another in terms of personality.  Assumptions, always being unwarranted by their very nature, can never serve as justification for treating a person a certain way.  Therefore, it can only be inherently unjust to assume something about a person's personality or moral character, since the only way for a non-telepath to come to know someone as an individual is by getting to know that person (there is no such thing as a rational assumption to begin with).  Someone's age, gender, ethnicity, social status, and country of birth or residence cannot tell you if he or she has a certain set of personality characteristics or if he or she is a good person.  There have been legions of stereotypes based on each of these categories, and in all cases they are fallacious.

Individualism is simply true, whether someone likes it or not.  It is also just whether or not someone wants to acknowledge it.  For some, the temptation to judge a person's character, interests, tendencies, or skills from afar--by means of a non sequitur conclusion based on irrelevant information--can be quite strong.  Perhaps it feels safe.  It might be a familiar way of life.  The only way one can truly see someone's personal characteristics, worldview, and character, however, is to get to know that person as the individual that he or she is.