Utilitarianism of Negative Separateness (UNS): Normative Addressability, Agency Collapse, and the Structural Limits of Moral Justification

This preprint develops Utilitarianism of Negative Separateness (UNS) as a foundational constraint on aggregative moral justification. The paper argues that aggregation presupposes the continued normative addressability of affected individuals—i.e., their availability as addressees of reasons. When social, legal, or economic structures expose agents to catastrophic loss such that refusal, exit, or non-compliance predictably entails agency collapse, this presupposition fails. Under these conditions—captured by the threshold concept of maximal suffering (Smax)—aggregation does not merely yield morally impermissible outcomes; it becomes semantically inapplicable. UNS does not propose a competing distributive principle, value to be optimized, or decision procedure. Instead, it identifies a meta-normative boundary for justification itself, locating the limit of aggregation at the level of addressability rather than value. The paper situates UNS as a form of constrained consequentialism that preserves outcome evaluation above the threshold of agency collapse while rejecting sacrifice, command, and compensatory reasoning where justificatory standing has dissolved. It invites critical engagement from moral and political philosophy, especially debates on aggregation, non-domination, coercion, and structural injustice.