“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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,” “Everyone has to make sacrifices,” 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 these phrases 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 Foucault and Brown 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 for the poor and disabled or their injury and death 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, organizational 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.

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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