Yes, But It Helps Some People: Rawls, Nozick, and the Rejection of Moral Commensurability

The phrase “yes, but it helps some people” has become a ubiquitous moral evasion in contemporary discourse. It purports to acknowledge harm while simultaneously neutralizing it through appeal to others’ benefit. At its core, this response presupposes a utilitarian logic—that benefits and harms among distinct persons can be aggregated, and that the suffering of some may be outweighed, justified, or morally annulled by the well-being of others. This logic, however intuitive in public policy or technocratic rhetoric, is precisely the form of reasoning that both John Rawls and Robert Nozick sought to dismantle. Each, from divergent philosophical standpoints, rejects the idea that moral legitimacy can be grounded in aggregate welfare. Both reassert the moral separateness of persons and expose the incoherence of treating harms and benefits as fungible quantities.

1. Rawls: Fairness and the Refusal of Moral Substitution

Rawls opens A Theory of Justice with an explicit rejection of utilitarian aggregation: “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override” (Rawls 1971, §1). This sentence is the decisive rebuke to the “yes, but it helps some people” defense. Rawls’s thought experiment of the original position and veil of ignorance operationalizes this rejection. From behind the veil—where agents are deprived of all knowledge of their social position, talents, or conception of the good—no one would consent to a principle allowing others to be harmed for aggregate benefit. The fairness procedure thus yields a test of moral legitimacy that does not depend on outcomes but on the mutual acceptability of principles to all who must live under them.

The “yes, but it helps some people” logic fails this test twice over. First, it presumes a point of view external to those who bear harm, thereby reinstating precisely the asymmetry the veil of ignorance was designed to eliminate. Second, it violates the difference principle, which allows inequalities only if they benefit the least advantaged members of society (Rawls 1971, §13). To invoke “it helps some people” without regard to whether those harmed are among the least advantaged is to reintroduce moral arbitrariness under the guise of pragmatism. Rawls’s critique, therefore, transforms moral justification from a calculus of total welfare into a procedure of reciprocity: justice is what no one could reasonably reject under conditions of equality.

Justice as Inviolability: Rawls’ Principle Against Sacrificial Calculus

Rawls’ claim that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought” (Rawls 1971, §3) provides a direct philosophical refutation of the “yes, but it helps some people” argument. In this formulation, Rawls emphasizes that no matter how efficient, elegant, or well-ordered a system may appear, it cannot be considered legitimate if it violates the fundamental claims of individuals. Justice, like truth in epistemology, is non-negotiable: institutional or legal arrangements cannot justify the infringement of persons’ rights merely to produce aggregate benefits.

The passage underscores three interrelated points: first, each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice, which even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. This principle precludes any utilitarian calculus in which some must suffer so that others may gain. Second, justice categorically denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by the greater good shared by others; it establishes limits on what can be morally demanded of individuals, independent of societal gain. Third, in a just society, liberties of equal citizenship are settled, and the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or utilitarian trade-offs.

In practical terms, this passage gives a normative tool to confront the evasion embedded in “yes, but it helps some people.” It allows one to argue that the appeal to aggregate benefit is irrelevant when the claims of those harmed fall within the domain of inviolable rights. Whereas utilitarian reasoning treats persons as fungible for the sake of efficiency or pleasure, Rawls insists that justice establishes non-negotiable moral boundaries, making any attempt to justify harm by pointing to others’ gains philosophically incoherent.

By explicitly framing justice as a first-order moral constraint on social institutions, Rawls transforms the conversation from one about net benefits to one about the legitimacy of harm itself. It is not a question of whether some benefit is produced, but whether the system respects the moral inviolability of each individual. In this sense, Rawls provides a formal, principled rebuttal to the rationalizations often implicit in the “yes, but it helps some people” defense.

2. Nozick: The Inviolability of Persons and the End of Moral Arithmetic

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick develops a parallel rejection of utilitarianism through the language of rights. “Individuals have rights,” he writes, “and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)” (Nozick 1974, p. ix). These rights function as side constraints, moral boundaries that are not to be overridden even by appeals to collective welfare. Nozick’s utility monster thought experiment exposes the absurdity inherent in the “yes, but it helps some people” claim: if one being’s pleasure outweighed the disutility of all others combined, utilitarian reasoning would require feeding everyone to that being. The experiment is reductio ad absurdum for the logic of aggregation itself.

When individuals are treated as variables in a welfare equation, their distinct moral standing collapses into instrumental value. The phrase “yes, but it helps some people” performs this collapse rhetorically—it displaces harm by appealing to the happiness of others. For Nozick, this move is not merely mistaken but incoherent: the good of one person cannot morally compensate for the violation of another’s rights. The moment that harm is justified by the benefits accruing elsewhere, moral reasoning has been replaced by moral bookkeeping, a practice that confuses persons with quantities.

3. The Shared Denial of Moral Fungibility

Despite profound philosophical differences—Rawls’s constructivism versus Nozick’s libertarian deontology—both thinkers converge on a foundational principle: the moral separateness of persons. Rawls embeds this separateness in procedural fairness; Nozick grounds it in rights. What they share is a categorical refusal of commensurability between distinct moral subjects. The “yes, but it helps some people” defense presupposes such commensurability, suggesting that harms and benefits can be meaningfully compared across persons as if they belonged to a single scale of value. For both Rawls and Nozick, this presupposition is false. Harms and benefits do not occupy a common moral currency when they pertain to different individuals; they are ethically inconvertible.

4. The Displacement of Responsibility

In political and moral discourse, “yes, but it helps some people” functions less as an argument than as a gesture of displacement. It acknowledges injury only to dissolve it into a statistical abstraction, thereby suspending moral attention at the very moment it is most required. Rawls’s framework reveals this as a failure of fairness: the harmed have not participated in any justificatory procedure that would make their suffering intelligible as just. Nozick’s framework reveals it as a violation of inviolability: persons have been treated as means rather than ends.

To appeal to others’ benefit in order to quiet the claims of the harmed is to abdicate the very concept of justification. As both Rawls and Nozick make clear, justice is not the art of converting suffering into net gain but the discipline of ensuring that no one’s suffering is rendered morally invisible. The proper answer to harm, therefore, is not “yes, but it helps some people,” but rather the recognition that helping some cannot redeem harming others where the harm is avoidable, uncompensated, or unjustly distributed.

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References

• Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

• Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974.

LLM