Utilitarianism of Negative Separateness (UNS). Normative Addressability, Aggregation, and the Structural Limits of Moral Justification

This preprint introduces Utilitarianism of Negative Separateness (UNS), a foundational normative framework that identifies a structural limit to moral and political justification. UNS does not challenge aggregation, utility, or consequentialist reasoning as such. Instead, it argues that all justificatory practices—aggregative or otherwise—presuppose a minimal condition of normative addressability: the ability of affected agents to receive reasons as reasons. The framework centers on the concept of a semantic threshold (Smax). Smax does not denote a quantity of suffering, nor a tipping point in cost–benefit analysis. It marks a qualitative collapse of agency, occurring when refusal, exit, or non-compliance reliably entails catastrophic loss (e.g. loss of shelter, subsistence, bodily integrity, or temporal continuity). Below this threshold, agents remain morally considerable but cease to be addressees of justification. Normative reasons are not overridden; they are invalidated. By distinguishing override from invalidation, UNS reframes familiar debates in moral and political philosophy. It shows that under threshold conditions, appeals to consent, legitimacy, obligation, or aggregate welfare do not merely fail morally but lose their conditions of intelligibility. Political authority in such contexts does not govern unjustly so much as non-addressively. The preprint develops the implications of this diagnosis for aggregation, market coordination, inheritance, merit, and political resistance. It argues that certain social structures systematically produce conditions of normative unavailability while continuing to speak the language of freedom. In these contexts, what appears as dissent or illegality is better understood as residual agency emerging where justification has become impossible. This document is a working paper / preprint, not peer reviewed. It is intended to establish the conceptual foundations of UNS prior to journal submission.