The position that a free deed arises from the individual's own moral intuition, never from external commandment, convention, or instinct.
Ethical individualism is the moral position Rudolf Steiner sets out in the closing chapters of The Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4, 1894): the free human act issues from a moral intuition the individual grasps for themselves, in the concrete situation, rather than from a commandment, a social convention, or a biological drive. Universal moral law cannot prescribe the free deed in advance. The I must see, and the I must act.
In Steiner's Own Words
The aggregate of the ideas which are effective in us, the concrete content of our intuitions, constitute that which is individual in each of us, notwithstanding the universal character of our ideas. In so far as this intuitive content has reference to action, it constitutes the moral substance of the individual. To let this substance express itself in his life is the moral principle of the man who regards all other moral principles as subordinate. We may call this point of view Ethical Individualism.
What it Means Today
Wikipedia and most secondary literature place ethical individualism beside Stirner, Nietzsche, and the libertarian tradition of the radical solitary will. Steiner's term carries almost the opposite weight. The free deed in The Philosophy of Freedom is not the assertion of a private preference against the world. It is the moment in which the I, having quieted instinct and stepped past the inherited code, sees what the situation actually asks of it, and acts out of love for that deed. The motive is the perceived idea, not the appetite. Steiner calls this love for the act, not self-love.
Read inside the consciousness soul age, the term names an ethical task rather than a private freedom. Earlier humanity could rest on revealed law, on tribal custom, on the conscience of the group. The consciousness soul cannot. Its moral life is barren unless the individual cognises the deed from within. This is the same supersensible cognition Steiner builds in the early chapters of The Philosophy of Freedom, now turned toward action. A practitioner uses the term as a mirror: when a deed of mine is genuinely free, I will be able to point to the intuition that prompted it, and that intuition will belong to me, not to a rule I was obeying. Anything less is, in Steiner's strict sense, still unfree. Ethical individualism gains cosmic weight in moral ideals as world forces.
Where to Read More