Utilitarianism of Negative Separateness (UNS): Normative Unavailability and the Limits of Aggregative Justification

This paper develops Utilitarianism of Negative Separateness (UNS), a novel consequentialist framework that introduces a structural limit to interpersonal aggregation. The central claim is that extreme suffering can produce what I call agency-collapse: a functional dissolution of the capacities required for deliberation, projection, and normative participation. When such collapse occurs, the affected subject becomes normatively unavailable for aggregative trade-offs. The paper proceeds in three stages. First, it offers a phenomenological analysis of suffering as attention-capture, arguing that beyond a certain threshold the functional architecture of deliberative agency ceases to operate. Second, it develops a formal account of normative addressability and defends the thesis that addressability is a conceptual precondition of justificatory practice, not an independent moral constraint. Third, it introduces the threshold of Sustainable Functioning of Agency (SFA) and formulates a lexical constraint: arrangements that predictably push subjects below SFA cannot be justified by aggregated benefits above it. UNS differs from classical negative utilitarianism, prioritarianism, sufficientarianism, and Rawlsian contractualism by grounding the separateness-of-persons objection in the internal logic of justification itself rather than in distributional fairness or moral status claims. The paper also offers a multi-layered response to ex ante justification strategies and clarifies the scope of the view in relation to non-human animals and marginal cases. The framework has implications for debates on aggregation, longtermism, distributive justice, and the ethics of risk-imposition. More broadly, it proposes a structural reinterpretation of the separateness-of-persons constraint: not as a moral side-constraint imposed on consequentialism, but as a boundary internal to justificatory reasoning.