“Yes, But it Helps Some People”: Rawls, Nozick, and the Refusal of Substitutional Harm

The common defense of harmful policies or practices on the grounds that “it helps some people” is a contemporary echo of utilitarian reasoning in its most impoverished form. Such claims rest, implicitly, on the assumption that benefits and harms among distinct persons are commensurable—that losses borne by some can be morally redeemed by gains to others. Both John Rawls and Robert Nozick develop foundational critiques of this assumption, rejecting the principle that aggregate welfare can justify individual suffering. Their arguments, though emerging from divergent theoretical commitments, converge on the idea that persons are not interchangeable bearers of value and that the moral integrity of each individual sets a limit on collective optimization.

1. Rawls: The Rejection of Moral Aggregation through Fairness

In A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls opens with a methodological shift that redefines the problem of justice itself. Rather than determining how to maximize social utility, Rawls seeks principles that free and equal persons could agree to under conditions ensuring impartiality. The original position and veil of ignorance are designed to eliminate the possibility of privileging one’s own circumstances in moral reasoning. From that standpoint, no rational agent would accept principles that permit their own sacrifice for the benefit of others, since they cannot know in advance whether they will occupy a privileged or disadvantaged position.

This procedural device refutes the utilitarian calculus by reasserting the distinction between persons. Justice, for Rawls, consists not in the optimization of total welfare but in the fair distribution of primary goods and opportunities under principles that all could endorse. The difference principle further refines this by allowing inequalities only if they improve the position of the least advantaged. In this light, the claim that “some people benefit” cannot by itself justify harm to others: moral legitimacy depends on whether the structure producing those benefits also secures the basic interests of those who are disadvantaged by it. The moral geometry of utilitarianism—where suffering can be offset by distant pleasure—is replaced by a framework of reciprocity and fairness grounded in mutual recognition.

2. Nozick: Inviolable Persons and the Limits of Utility

Nozick’s critique in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) begins from a different starting point but reaches a parallel conclusion. By means of the utility monster thought experiment, he demonstrates the reductio of utilitarian aggregation: if moral legitimacy derives from maximizing total welfare, then beings capable of experiencing greater utility could justly consume the resources—or lives—of others. The horror of this implication reveals the failure of utilitarian moral arithmetic. For Nozick, individuals possess rights as side constraints, not as variables in a social equation. These rights delineate moral boundaries that cannot be crossed, even for the sake of collective gain.

To invoke “it helps some people” as a defense of harm is, on Nozick’s analysis, to treat persons as means rather than ends. The very grammar of the statement presupposes the permissibility of substitution: that one person’s suffering can be morally neutralized by another’s benefit. Against this, Nozick asserts that moral justification cannot be redistributive in kind; it must respect the separateness and inviolability of each individual’s claims.

3. The Collapse of Moral Commensurability

Taken together, Rawls and Nozick expose the philosophical bankruptcy of appeals to partial benefit as moral justification. Rawls invalidates such reasoning through the logic of fairness and hypothetical consent: no one would rationally choose to inhabit a world where others’ well-being can license their own subjugation. Nozick invalidates it through the logic of rights: moral boundaries are not subject to optimization. Both positions entail a rejection of commensurability between distinct moral subjects—an insistence that harm and benefit do not belong to a single calculable register when they pertain to different persons.

In practical discourse, “it helps some people” functions as a rhetorical evasion of responsibility. It converts concrete injury into an abstract variable, displacing moral attention from the harmed to the aggregate. Against this evasion, the Rawlsian and Nozickian critiques together reaffirm a fundamental moral intuition: that the legitimacy of a social order depends not on its aggregate success but on whether it can justify itself to those upon whom its burdens fall.

To affirm that “it helps some people” is, therefore, not to make a moral argument but to abdicate one. Justice begins precisely where that abdication is refused.

LLM