As a moral philosophy, individualism holds that only individual persons can be moral agents.
It holds that rights and responsibilities are only relevant to individuals.
Individualism denies that there are any collective moral agents, and therefore denies rights or responsibilities to groups (but not to the individuals within those groups).
[bk]
Straw-man "individualism": The position that individual rights always supersede group rights.
Stated this way, individualism seems unreasonable -- seems in fact like a call for dogmatically privileging one entity over another. True individualism is both far more reasonable and far more radical for it denies the very existence of such a thing as "group rights".
According to individualism, no one's rights ever supersede anyone else's rights because all rights are equal and compatible.
[bk]
In individualism, the "collective is not the ultimate value, but rather a vehicle for the realization of individual goals".
R.W. Grant, The Incredible Bread Machine
[rwGrant]
'Individualism' has a great variety of meanings in social and political philosophy. Three important types can be distinguished: ontological individualism, methodological individualism, and moral and political individualism. These three are often confused by highly reputable liberal and conservative philosophers [...] Ontological individualism is the uncontroversial metaphysical doctrine that social reality consists, ultimately, only of persons who act and choose. Collectivities, such as a social class, a state, or a group, cannot act. It is more easily understood in contrast to ontological collectivism, which does suppose that such collectivities have a reality independent of the actions of persons.
[krauth]
We have talked at length of individual rights; but what, it may be asked, of the "rights of society"? Don't they supersede the rights of the mere individual? The libertarian, however, is an individualist; he believes that one of the prime errors in social theory is to treat "society" as if it were an actually existing entity. "Society" is sometimes treated as a superior or quasi-divine figure with overriding "rights" of its own; at other times as an existing evil which can be blamed for all the ills of the world. The individualist holds that only individuals exist, think, feel, choose, and act; and that "society" is not a living entity but simply a label for a set of interacting individuals. Treating society as a thing that chooses and acts, then, serves to obscure the real forces at work.
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[available online]
[rothbard]
The word 'individualist' had little of the idea of the abstracted self that the word today conjures. Rather, it was a dense concept suggesting an alternative to the collectivism of socialism and communism, certainly, but also remaining open to the interaction between the individual and his society and culture that crafts distinctive personality. Individualists, in this sense, belong to societies in ways they couldn't possibly belong to states, any more than theory could be wholly self-created.
analysis, a blog for individualists
(citing The Intercollegiate Review on Lee Edward's Educating for Liberty)
[analysis]