I argue that there are liberal reasons to reject what I call “Global Individualism”, which is the conjunction of two views strongly associated with liberalism: moral individualism and social individualism. According to the first view, all moral properties are reducible to individual moral properties. The second holds that the social world is composed only of individual agents. My argument has the following structure: after suggesting that Global Individualism does not misrepresent liberalism, I draw on some recent insights in social ontology to show that it is inconsistent with the satisfaction of an important liberal principle related to the protection of individual rights over time. As I hold, to solve this problem we need to accept group agents acting as moral agents, which in turn commits us to the weaker notion of normative individualism (a view that is consistent with the existence of some group moral properties). I conclude with the suggestion that even this solution is costly for liberalism, for the conjunction of group moral agency and normative individualism makes the latter unstable and compels liberals to a much less individualistic stance than expected.

我认为，有自由主义的理由拒绝所谓的“全球个人主义”，这是与自由主义密切相关的两种观点的结合：道德个人主义和社会个人主义。根据第一种观点，所有道德属性都可以还原为个人道德属性。第二种观点认为，社会世界仅由个体主体组成。我的论点具有以下结构：在暗示全球个人主义不会曲解自由主义之后，我借鉴了社会本体论方面的一些最新见解，以表明它不符合与保护个人权利有关的一项重要的自由主义原则随着时间的推移而产生的矛盾。按照我的观点，要解决这个问题，我们需要接受充当道德代理的团体代理，这反过来又使我们陷入较弱的规范个人主义概念（这种观点与某些群体道德属性的存在相一致）。我的结论是，即使这种解决方案对自由主义来说也是昂贵的，因为团体道德代理与规范性个人主义的结合使后者变得不稳定，并迫使自由主义者采取比预期少得多的个人主义立场。