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Drawing on some of Bernard Williams's work, especially his essays ‘The Idea of Equality’ and ‘The Human Prejudice’, this chapter argues that ‘speciesism’ is very unlike racism or sexism, and that much of the philosophical apparatus which has been mobilized on behalf of anti-speciesism, such as moral individualism and the argument from marginal cases, is unsound. Moral individualists hold that the standards of appropriate ethical treatment of a creature must display fundamental sensitivity to only the intrinsic non-relational properties exemplified by that creature. But this doctrine cannot tell us, all by itself, when a creature has been unfortunate, and hence deserving of protection or compensation. Those questions can only be settled by locating the creature in a community of fellow creatures, which define the relevant standards of flourishing and misfortune. It is further contended that there is nothing unintelligible or morally obnoxious about defining these communities in species-sensitive ways, and that our understanding of the wrongness of racism and sexism is actually dependent on the background thought that those individuals who are victimized by racist or sexist treatment belong to a particular community: the human community.

Moral individualism is the doctrine that rationality leaves room for the individualities or personalities of subjects to express themselves in the moral realm in an autonomous choice between idealism and fulfilment-maximization. By leaving this room for autonomy, moral individualism avoids some objections that have been launched, by Bernard Williams in particular, against monistic theories like utilitarianism. On the other hand, moral individualism also provides a great deal of space for moral disagreement. The chapter ends by pointing to some factors that enable us to enter into agreements that could limit the extent of this disagreement.

The idea of the independent, self-determining individual has been central to the defence of diversity and difference, but it has also been used to defend the established order. There are three overlapping fields of discourse. Moral individualism is a view of how people should be treated, based on independence, rights, personal liberty and moral responsibility. Methodological individualism is a way of understanding the world, either considering people as individuals, or in its stronger versions denying other, collective forms of analysis. The most important approaches are based either on average individuals or on the model of a rational, self-interested individual. Substantive individualism is a view that there are only individuals, and there is no such thing as society. These three discourses overlap, but they are separable; there is no necessary reason why someone who accepts individualist concepts in one respect should adopt the others.

This chapter analyses the concept of identity developed by Amartya Sen in recent work, especially in the book Identity and Violence. It discusses the relationship between identity and solidarity, arguing that, the former is necessary but by no means sufficient for the latter, so that, contra what Sen sometimes suggests, identities are not simply forms of solidarity. It then argues that Sen's account is both morally and methodologically individualist which seems right and that it is also correct in seeing identities as, in a certain sense, normative. But it then shows that his account is also rationalist, in treating identity as grounding reasons for thinking and acting, and that this leaves out the important role of non-rational factors in the social and political mobilization of identity. This means that some of Sen's policy proposals, while helpful, will not deal with some serious cases where identity leads to political violence.