“Yes, But it Helps Some People”: Rawls, Nozick, and the Rejection of Moral Commensurability
Variations on the phrase “yes, but it helps some people” have become a ubiquitous moral evasion in contemporary discourse.[1] The phrase 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 dismantled.[2] 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 (1971) 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” (§1). This sentence is a decisive rebuke to the “yes, but it helps some people” defence. 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 those 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 (§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.
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 administrative, colloquial, 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. Rawls and Nozick converge on the principle that justice and rights are not subject to political bargaining or the calculus of social interests. The proper answer to harm is therefore 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.
5. Justice as the First Virtue of Social Institutions
Rawls’ assertion that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought” (§3) provides an explicit normative foundation for rejecting utilitarian trade-offs. The passage emphasizes that no system of laws or institutions—however efficient, elegant, or well-arranged—can be legitimate if it violates the claims of individuals. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice, which even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. This principle directly confronts the “yes, but it helps some people” logic: no amount of benefit to others can morally justify the sacrifice of some.
Rawls underscores that justice establishes non-negotiable moral boundaries, securing liberties and rights that are not subject to aggregation or political bargaining. When applied to concrete harm, this framework renders the argument, that gains for some justify another’s losses, both irrelevant and philosophically incoherent. Justice, as Rawls conceives it, is therefore not a matter of efficiency, total welfare, or aggregate advantage; it is a first-order constraint on institutional design and social morality, guaranteeing that each person’s freedom and claim to fair treatment is respected.
Historical Illustrations: The Moral Consequences of Aggregative Reasoning
History is littered with sobering examples of how aggregative moral reasoning—when divorced from inviolability, rights, or the recognition of persons as ends in themselves—has justified grievous harm. The point is not to equate diverse historical situations, but to observe a recurring structure of rationalization: the appeal to collective benefit as a means to neutralize or obscure individual suffering.
In totalitarian regimes, for example, appeals to the welfare of the majority frequently served to legitimate persecution and exclusion. The Nazi state’s invocation of Volksgemeinschaft—the “people’s community”—was couched in precisely such terms. Policies of exclusion, sterilization, and extermination were justified by reference to an imagined improvement of the collective body. The individual, in this logic, was a fungible element in the service of an abstract social good. Here the calculus of “helping some” became the language through which harm was normalized and moral perception anaesthetized.[3]
This structure extends beyond totalitarianism. Colonial projects, too, often deployed utilitarian rhetoric, portraying domination as a civilizing mission or a conduit for progress. The argument that colonization “helped some people”—by spreading literacy, commerce, or modern governance—functioned as a moral screen for dispossession and violence. In such cases, the aggregation of supposed benefits erased the moral particularity of those who bore the costs.
This same structure of rationalization — harm justified through an appeal to aggregate welfare or “net benefit” — remains deeply embedded in contemporary political, economic, and technological life.[4]
These examples clarify why Rawls and Nozick insist that justice begins from refusal: refusal to weigh persons against one another, to trade off harm and benefit as if they shared a common moral currency. Once the moral field is flattened into a ledger of gains and losses, harm ceases to signify as harm; it becomes a statistical variable rather than a violation. Both thinkers expose the epistemic as well as the ethical distortion at work here: that suffering, when abstracted into a calculus, loses its claim to moral attention.
Historical reflection thus deepens the philosophical argument. The “yes, but it helps some people” logic, when pursued without constraint, corrodes the moral language through which injustice can even be recognized. Against this corrosion, Rawls’ insistence on inviolability and Nozick’s conception of side constraints are not merely theoretical constructs—they are bulwarks against the perennial temptation to justify harm through the arithmetic of social good.
6. Conclusion
The “yes, but it helps some people” defence is, upon careful examination, neither an ethical justification nor a persuasive argument. Rawls and Nozick independently reveal its philosophical incoherence. Rawls’ procedural and fairness-based conception of justice, culminating in the inviolability of basic liberties, precludes the use of aggregate benefit as moral justification. Nozick’s rights-based framework emphasizes that individuals cannot be treated as means to others’ ends, rendering any appeal to generalized welfare irrelevant. Both thinkers converge on a single insight: harms and benefits are not morally interchangeable between distinct persons. We cannot simply dismiss, ignore, or “offset” the harm experienced by particular individuals. Moral reasoning begins where the abdication of responsibility for those harmed is refused, and it continues by recognizing the non-negotiable claims of each individual.
For Rawls, this refusal takes the form of inviolability: the principle that the basic structure of society must be designed so that no one’s fundamental liberties or life prospects can be sacrificed for aggregate welfare. For Nozick, the refusal is encoded in his notion of side constraints—rights that others may not cross, regardless of the consequences. This act of refusal constitutes the moral foundation of both theories.
[1] Utilitarian logic permeates ordinary speech, often without recognition of its moral implications. Common phrases such as “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” “It’s for the greater good,” “It’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing,” “In an ideal world we would do what you suggest but it’s not a ideal world,” “Everyone has to make sacrifices,” “It's a necessary evil,” and “That’s just how progress works” reveal how harm is normalized through appeals to aggregate benefit. In these expressions, individual suffering is tacitly converted into an acceptable cost, while systemic inequities are reinterpreted as necessary by-products of social advancement. Such language performs moral abstraction in real time. It translates concrete harms into abstract goods, reframing loss as contribution and exploitation as efficiency. What appears as pragmatic reasoning is, in fact, the everyday face of a moral calculus that erases persons in favour of outcomes. The ease with which phrases like these circulate testifies to how thoroughly utilitarian and instrumentalist logic has been naturalized.
[2] Yet not all acts resembling utilitarian reasoning arise from the same moral architecture. There is a difference between instrumentalized utilitarianism (as an ideology or moral rationalization) and tragic moral necessity (as a breakdown or suspension of the moral order under duress). In situations like famine, siege, or existential threat, the ethical field itself becomes unstable because the very conditions that make moral reasoning possible have collapsed. It’s not that the agent chooses the greater good; rather, choosing itself becomes a form of triage. When a starving man steals bread to feed his family, morality doesn’t disappear — it shifts register. The act remains a violation of property rights, but it also becomes an assertion of life against abstraction, a rebellion against the very moral order that would let a family starve. Likewise, in wartime or survival contexts, the calculus is not “utilitarian” in the philosophical sense but “tragic”: it arises from necessity, not from ideology.
At the same time, what’s often called tragic necessity in public discourse is, in practice, instrumentalized utilitarianism wearing the mask of tragedy. The moral language of tragedy — sacrifice, inevitability, hard choices — becomes a rhetorical screen that sanitizes decision-making from responsibility. It performs compassion while enacting calculation. This is the rhetorical conversion of utilitarian logic into the register of tragedy: power justifies its violence as sorrowful but necessary. This conflation is potent because it invites empathy for the decision-maker rather than for the victims, and converts moral horror into moral burden. Tragedy becomes an alibi for governance; necessity becomes a mask for decision.
The Nazis, for instance, portrayed their atrocities as sorrowful but necessary acts—an unbearable moral burden undertaken for the survival of the Volkskörper. Imperial powers, too, invoked the “white man’s burden,” casting domination as a melancholy duty of civilization. In both cases, the rhetoric of tragic necessity transformed violence into virtue, allowing perpetrators to appear burdened rather than culpable. What might, under genuine duress, mark the limits of morality became instead the idiom through which its suspension was justified. Real duress is anchored in material and existential precarity, not in narrative self-presentation.
[3] The anaesthetization of moral perception is not simply a failure of empathy; it is an effect of structure. Utilitarian reasoning, by translating suffering into abstract calculations of cost and benefit, reorganizes the very conditions under which moral feeling can arise. As harm becomes expressed in the neutral language of policy, efficiency, or progress, affective life is trained to accommodate it.
This transformation operates simultaneously at the level of feeling and reason. Affective desensitization—what Sontag might call the dulling of response through repetition, or Butler the framing of some lives as less grievable—combines with the rationalizing logics that Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown and many others identify in modern governance. Together they produce a mode of moral perception that no longer recognizes harm as such, because harm has already been accounted for. Suffering is pre-absorbed into the calculus of necessity, leaving no remainder of outrage.
In this sense, moral anaesthesia is not the absence of feeling but its capture: feeling is folded into governance, empathy converted into proof of moral seriousness, sorrow instrumentalized as justification. The utilitarian calculus thus becomes not only a form of reasoning but a technology of affect—one that teaches subjects to experience horror as duty, and complicity as care. What once elicited horror becomes a matter of administration.
[4] Economic Policy and Austerity
Policies of austerity, artificial scarcity and welfare retrenchment are often defended through the language of fiscal responsibility or macroeconomic health: short-term hardship, injury and death for the poor, disabled and chronically ill are presented as necessary sacrifices for long-term national stability. The state’s moral calculus treats suffering as an externality of aggregate prosperity. The logic mirrors older utilitarian defenses of harm: some must be immiserated or liquidated so that “the economy” may flourish—an abstraction standing in for collective good.
Climate Policy and Environmental Sacrifice Zones
In climate and energy policy, the calculus of “net-zero” often masks uneven distributions of harm. Communities near extraction sites, toxic dumps, or carbon offset plantations are sacrificed in the name of global decarbonization goals.
The rhetoric of collective sustainability rationalizes the suffering of particular populations — frequently Indigenous or economically marginalized — as necessary trade-offs for planetary survival. The utilitarian veneer conceals a colonial continuity: some lands and lives remain “expendable” for the greater ecological good.
Global Development and Humanitarianism
Development aid and humanitarian interventions often repeat the colonial pattern: justifying displacement or cultural erasure as the price of modernization, education, or “women’s empowerment.” Large infrastructure or “green growth” projects impose suffering on local populations while being narrated as moral progress. The calculus of aggregate improvement obscures the asymmetrical distribution of both benefits and harms.
Mental Health Systems
In mental health contexts, systemic failures are often rationalized through the language of aggregation. When individuals harmed by organized abandonment, neglect, or exclusion their suffering is weighed against the well-being of others. This response presupposes a utilitarian logic: that benefits and harms among distinct persons can be aggregated, and that the pain of some may be morally annulled by the recovery of others. The singularity of mental distress is dissolved into statistical outcomes, and healing becomes a metric rather than a moral commitment. Those most failed by the system—often marginalized by status—are rendered invisible via this calculus.
Corporate and Technocratic Governance
The rhetoric of “shareholder value,” “growth,” and “innovation” operates as a moral proxy: systemic harms to workers, ecosystems, and communities are justified through appeals to aggregate benefit (jobs, GDP, consumer welfare). The corporation becomes the contemporary site of utilitarian reason, its “externalities” the moral blind spots of modernity.
In all of these examples, the underlying structure is constant:
The moral singularity of persons or populations is dissolved into the smooth arithmetic of benefit and cost. The aggregation of good becomes the alibi for suffering.
References
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Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
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Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974.
Sandel Against the Utilitarianism of Mill and Bentham
Michael Sandel has built a significant body of work on critiquing the foundations of modern liberalism and market fundamentalism. Central to his critique is a sustained philosophical challenge to utilitarianism, the ethical framework developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which defines justice and morality solely by the maximization of overall happiness or "utility." He argues that this approach fundamentally misunderstands the nature of justice and the value of human dignity. For Sandel, utilitarianism is not merely a flawed ethical theory; it is a moral framework that reduces rich human values to a cold calculus, treats individuals as expendable means to an aggregate end, and underpins a technocratic, market-driven society that erodes authentic civic life and shared moral deliberation.
Utilitarianism reduces morality to calculation
Michael Sandel argues that utilitarianism—especially as articulated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill—collapses all moral reasoning into a single measure: maximizing happiness or utility. He sees this as a flattening of moral life, since it ignores the qualitative differences among kinds of pleasures, goods, and values. To ask what produces the greatest happiness is to miss what really matters: the right, the just, the good in themselves. For Sandel, utilitarianism’s quantitative calculus turns morality into a kind of market reasoning—weighing costs and benefits rather than asking what is worthy, fair, or just.
It treats individuals as means rather than ends
A core Kantian influence runs through Sandel’s critique: Utilitarianism, he says, sacrifices the individual for the sake of aggregate welfare. If killing or exploiting one person increases total happiness, utilitarianism has no principled objection. Sandel sees this as a violation of human dignity and moral autonomy. It allows for injustices like slavery, torture, or discrimination—so long as the total happiness balance sheet looks positive. The utilitarian calculus fails to respect the separateness of persons. This line echoes John Rawls, whom Sandel studied and later debated—but Sandel agrees with Rawls here that utilitarianism erases the moral boundary between persons by summing up their experiences as if society were one big organism.
It confuses the good with the right
For Sandel, the “right” (moral principles and justice) should not be determined solely by the “good” (happiness, welfare, or preference satisfaction). Utilitarianism reverses this: it defines rightness by whatever maximizes good consequences. Sandel argues that this leads to moral relativism disguised as moral certainty—since there is no intrinsic right or wrong, only more or less utility.
It encourages a technocratic and market-oriented politics
In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Sandel extends this critique beyond ethics into politics and economics. He sees utilitarian logic as the moral foundation of neoliberalism—where policy decisions are justified by cost-benefit analyses rather than by public deliberation about values and purposes. “We drift from having a market economy to being a market society.” Utilitarianism, in his view, underwrites that drift because it measures all values on a single scale (utility, efficiency, willingness to pay), thereby eroding civic virtue and moral judgment.
Sandel’s alternative: justice as moral and civic reasoning
Against utilitarianism, Sandel advocates for public reasoning about the good life—a revival of Aristotelian and communitarian ethics. He argues that questions of justice cannot be settled by aggregate preference or neutrality; they require debate about what we owe to one another and what kind of society we want to be.
References
Sandel, Michael J. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
G.A. Cohen on Utilitarianism
G.A. Cohen’s engagement with utilitarianism was both critical and diagnostic. Although he acknowledged the moral plausibility of utilitarianism’s concern for welfare and outcomes, he ultimately regarded it as an inadequate and morally impoverished theory of justice. Cohen’s critique must be situated within his broader project as a Marxist and egalitarian philosopher working in the analytical tradition, particularly in dialogue with the liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls.
1. Rejection of Utilitarian Justice
Cohen’s most fundamental objection to utilitarianism concerns its conception of justice as the maximization of aggregate welfare. He contended that such an approach, while superficially impartial, permits the sacrifice of individuals or groups for the sake of greater total utility. This aggregative feature renders utilitarianism incapable of respecting persons as distinct moral agents. In Cohen’s view, justice cannot be equated with the optimization of outcomes; it must instead recognize the inviolability of individual claims and the intrinsic worth of equality as a moral value.
2. Equality as Foundational, Not Derivative
Cohen’s philosophical orientation places equality at the centre of moral and political life. He argued that utilitarianism, by reducing all moral considerations to a single metric of utility, effectively subsumes and thereby neutralizes equality as an independent value. In contrast, Cohen defended what he described as a radical egalitarianism—a commitment not merely to equality of opportunity but to equality of access to advantage, a concept designed to integrate both resource-based and welfare-based elements of distributive justice. For Cohen, genuine justice demands that equality be treated as an autonomous principle rather than as an instrument subordinate to aggregate welfare.
3. Beyond Consequentialism
Although utilitarianism represents the most influential form of consequentialism, Cohen questioned the assumption that all moral reasoning must be outcome-oriented. He argued that certain moral principles—particularly those governing equality and respect for persons—retain their normative force independently of empirical consequences. In Rescuing Justice and Equality (2008), Cohen advanced a “pre-institutional” conception of justice that grounds moral principles in their intrinsic rightness rather than their capacity to produce desirable states of affairs. This position directly contrasts with utilitarianism’s reliance on the aggregation of welfare as the criterion of moral validity.
4. The Problem of Aggregation
Cohen shared with Rawls a deep objection to the aggregative logic of utilitarianism. The utilitarian procedure of summing individual satisfactions into a single measure of collective happiness, he argued, effaces what Rawls termed the “separateness of persons.” By permitting trade-offs between individuals’ well-being, utilitarianism undermines the very notion of justice as a relation among distinct moral subjects. For Cohen, the principle of equality cannot be meaningfully maintained within a framework that allows the suffering of some to be outweighed by the happiness of others.
5. Consequentialism without Utilitarianism
Despite his rejection of utilitarianism, Cohen did not entirely repudiate consequentialist reasoning. He accepted that moral evaluation must attend to the outcomes of actions and institutions, but he insisted that the relevant outcomes are not those that maximize aggregate utility, but those that realize a just and equal social order. His position might therefore be described as a form of egalitarian consequentialism, wherein the moral quality of outcomes is judged by their conformity to the demands of equality rather than by their contribution to total welfare.
6. The Bias Toward Existing Value
Cohen further criticized utilitarianism’s assumption that value is fungible—that all goods are commensurable within a single scale of utility. He proposed instead that moral agents exhibit, and ought to exhibit, a “bias toward existing value.” This bias captures the moral significance of particular attachments, relationships, and institutions that cannot be adequately represented by utilitarian calculation. To replace a valuable existing relationship or commitment with a marginally better one, as utilitarian reasoning might recommend, would neglect the moral weight of continuity, loyalty, and the historical situatedness of value.
7. Fact-Insensitive Principles
In his later meta-ethical work, Cohen developed the concept of fact-insensitive principles of justice—principles whose validity does not depend on empirical contingencies such as human motivation, social institutions, or psychological tendencies. This view stands in sharp contrast to utilitarianism’s fact-dependence, which ties moral evaluation to empirical consequences and the contingencies of human experience. For Cohen, grounding justice in such contingent facts risks collapsing moral principle into sociological description.
Conclusion
Cohen regarded utilitarianism as an intellectually serious but ultimately defective moral theory. While he acknowledged its humane impulse to promote welfare, he argued that its aggregative and maximizing logic could not accommodate the moral primacy of equality or the distinctness of persons. Against the utilitarian vision of justice as the efficient production of welfare, Cohen articulated a vision of justice as fidelity to equality itself—fact-insensitive, non-aggregative, and grounded in the intrinsic moral worth of persons and their relations.
Deneen on Utilitarianism
Patrick Deneen critiques utilitarianism as part of his broader rejection of liberalism, viewing it as a philosophy that prioritizes technical mastery and economic utility over moral and cultural limits.
In his writings, particularly in Why Liberalism Failed and essays like “Unsustainable Liberalism,” Deneen argues that liberalism—especially in its modern, technocratic form—embraces a utilitarian mindset that treats the natural world and human life as resources to be optimized. He criticizes this approach for encouraging the exploitation of nature and the erosion of traditional moral boundaries in the name of progress and individual autonomy.
Here are some key points from his critique:
Instrumental view of nature and humanity: Deneen contends that liberalism, influenced by utilitarian logic, supports “nearly any utilitarian use of the world for economic ends,” reducing nature and even human bodies to tools for achieving individual desires.
Technological liberation: He sees utilitarianism as aligned with a belief in technological solutions to human limitations, which he argues leads to alienation and a loss of meaning.
Moral relativism: Deneen suggests that utilitarianism undermines enduring moral truths by replacing them with calculations of utility, which can justify nearly any action if it produces a net benefit.
Deneen’s critique is not just of utilitarianism in isolation, but of its role within a liberal order that, in his view, has become unsustainable and corrosive to the common good.
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