All of this begins with an observation about faith.
In 1921 Walter Benjamin wrote a short text of only a few pages, entitled Capitalism as Religion. His thesis is startling: capitalism is not an economic order with religious coloring; it is itself a religion — the only cult that does not bring about the expiation of guilt but induces it. Those who believe in it refuse all questioning, not because they possess arguments but because questioning itself is not permitted within the structure of the faith. This thesis has since been developed by many, but Benjamin was the first to see the structure: how an apparently secular order acquires a sacred immunity.
The theme has a genealogy. Weber said that the defining event of modernity is the disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung). After disenchantment, transcendence in the vertical sense — God, the beyond, the salvation of the soul — was suspended. Discussion of death and the afterlife was shown to the waiting room. But human beings cannot do without transcendence. With the vertical channel blocked, transcendence turned a corner and became horizontal: the infinite appropriation of material resources, the infinite expectation of technological progress, the infinite yearning for an infinitely beautiful future. Löwith put it more bluntly: the modern idea of progress is nothing but a secularized Christian eschatology — the script of salvation unchanged, only the stage moved from heaven to the future.
So far, these are things others have said. But I have begun to feel that there is a question no one asks.
Who says the future is bound to be beautiful?
Anyone who has lived through an era of rapid development has probably felt this: the economy grows year after year, incomes rise year after year, technology breaks through year after year — and the default premise of society becomes "the future will surely be better." Not "might be better," not "probably better," but of course better, as certain as the sunrise. This faith has its variants the world over: the catch-up economies of East Asia, the postwar West, the post–Cold War confidence in "the end of history," the technological utopianism of Silicon Valley — all of them share a single underlying conviction. The eruption of AI has fitted this premise with a turbine: the acceleration of technological breakthroughs has suddenly furnished the vision of "an infinitely beautiful future" with visible evidence. The future is no longer a rhetorical flourish; it has become an article of faith — something that need not be argued for, only believed.
And then I noticed something.
There are a great many narratives that, in the name of the future, are sacrificing the present without the slightest hesitation. 996, overwork, austerity, ecological costs — every such sacrifice has its own rhetoric: "for future competitiveness," "for the well-being of the next generation," "for long-term development." And what is more, the critique of capitalism itself is frequently re-encoded as "a sacrifice necessary for the future" — as though resistance to present injustice were entitled to legitimacy only insofar as it served as a stepping-stone toward a future utopia.
This unsettles me. Not because these sacrifices may not be worth it — that is another question — but because no one has asked: is it legitimate, in the first place, to demand sacrifice in the name of the future? The burden of proof has inexplicably vanished. You say "for the future," and you are absolved from argument; I say "I do not wish to be sacrificed," and somehow I am the one who must explain myself.
What capitalism does within this structure is monopolize the right to interpret the future. The spiritual vacuum left by the collapse of vertical transcendence is filled by horizontal transcendence — and the most powerful vehicle of horizontal transcendence is "the future." Capitalism channels the emptied spirit of human beings toward an infinite yearning for the future, and then grips the right of interpretation firmly in its own hands: growth is good, technology is good, consumption is good, because all of them point to the future. Any questioning of the present, insofar as it cannot be translated into "for a better future," is structurally disallowed.
This is dangerous. Because the entire structure rests on a single faith — that the future will be better. And faith is not fact. The moment economic growth stalls — as it is doing right now — the moment the promise of technological breakthrough fails to materialize on schedule, what confronts people is not merely a recession but a wave of spiritual emptiness. When faith collapses, what fills the void is not lucidity but nihilism. The collapse of the birth rate, the pervasive pessimism of the young toward the future, "lying flat" — these are not accidental phenomena; they are signals of a receding tide of faith.
This essay is the first step along this line of thought. I do not propose to explain here how the future became a sacred object — that is the work of another book. The aim of this essay is more precise: first to argue that the "future narrative" is not naturally legitimate, that its moral authority suffers from a theoretical defect. The moral priority of the future is not something bestowed; it is an unexamined structure of argument running covertly in the background.
This structure I call MPF — the moral privileging of the future. Its definition is succinct: the moment someone invokes "the future," the burden of proof shifts automatically onto the one who demurs.
Note that the question has never been "whether to be oriented toward the future." We do of course owe the future certain things — a habitable planet, the possibility of civilization's long continuance. A critique that is merely anti-future, anti-growth, does not rise to serious intergenerational ethics. The real question is that between "we owe the future something" and "the future is owed everything" there lies an unexamined slippery slope. It is this slope that the essay sets out to examine.
The Strongest Defense Establishes, at Most, a Bounded Obligation
In fairness, let us first construct the strongest philosophical defense of MPF — the ones to be found in serious intergenerational ethics — and then show that they establish, at most, a bounded obligation, not an unbounded priority.
Hans Jonas grounds responsibility for the future in the "asymmetry of responsibility": future people can only be foreseen, never conversed with, and cannot reciprocate. His categorical imperative reads: "Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on earth." Note the word — "compatible" (verträglich), not "maximized." Jonas's obligation is negative, minimal, protective: it constrains us ("do not destroy X") but never licenses "the present may be sacrificed to any degree for the sake of the future." To recruit Jonas as a supporter of MPF is to abuse him.
Derek Parfit's argument against temporal discounting says: the same suffering counts for the same amount, no matter when it occurs. This is a symmetry proposition — future people and present people weigh equally. What follows from it is "equal weight," not "greater weight." To get from symmetry to priority requires an additional leap that Parfit himself does not make.
William MacAskill's longtermism begins from "the overwhelming vastness of the numbers": the future may contain an astronomical number of people, and by expected-value reasoning, the reduction of existential risk may be the morally most important thing. Grant him his premise — and what he supports is still only that the aggregate of future welfare may be enormous, carrying weight in an aggregate expected-utility calculation. This remains "there are more of them," not "each counts for more."
The three most serious intergenerational ethicists, taken together, establish at most this:
(O) We owe the future certain weighty, and sometimes overriding, obligations, both because future persons are equal to us in moral weight and because the aggregate of the future may be vast.
(O) is Jonas-like, bounded, constrained by the equal standing of present persons. MPF is not entailed by (O). (O) says "the future is a moral reason that must be taken into account"; MPF says "the future is an amplifier that automatically magnifies moral weight." To slide from (O) into MPF is to turn a consideration that must be weighed alongside other reasons into a moral trump card that takes effect the moment it is invoked.
But so far I have only shown that MPF lacks philosophical authorization. To show why it is wrong requires a normative ground.
The Irreducibility of Present Persons
The core proposition:
(F) The present possesses an irreducible moral standing that cannot be overturned merely by an appeal to the interests of the future.
"Irreducible" means: the moral standing of present persons cannot be reduced to, dissolved into, or outvoted by an aggregate of future welfare. One person's loss cannot be offset on the ground that "many people in the future will benefit."
In other words — the future is not an automatic normative amplifier. Any claim that appeals to the future does not, merely by virtue of pointing to the future, acquire additional moral weight.
This ground has two layers of support.
The first layer: the separateness of persons. What makes utilitarian aggregation across persons problematic is that persons are separate — each life is a locus of its own experience and value, and the loss of one cannot be offset by the gain of another. Rawls says that "each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Nagel regards "the separateness of persons" as the structural difficulty utilitarianism has the hardest time handling.
I project this anti-aggregation constraint onto the time axis: to aggregate across present persons and future persons is equally illegitimate. This projection is warranted because the separateness objection targets not the temporal index of persons but the irreplaceability of each subject of experience — a property that holds across time just as it holds within a single generation.
There is a structural aggravating factor here. Aggregation across time is not merely "aggregation across persons" (the kind already forbidden by the first layer); it is aggregation conducted on behalf of the interested party: the party that bears the cost (present persons) is the very party that carries out the aggregation; while the party aggregated over (future persons) cannot appear as a holder of rights, cannot say "enough." The aggregation is performed by those who bear the cost, on behalf of those who cannot contest its terms — which means that aggregation across time is not more permissibly but more strictly in need of prohibition. MPF exploits precisely this point: it converts the absence of the future from a constraint on aggregation into a license for infinite aggregation, because the absent party cannot call a halt.
The second layer: non-instrumentalization. The structure of "sacrifice for the future" treats present persons as fuel, as means toward a future end. Kant's formula of humanity forbids treating persons merely as means. A present person is not a line item in a ledger of future optimization; she is an end in herself.
The "Legitimacy Gap" of the Future
Thus far the argument has been moral. (F) has a corollary in political legitimacy, and this is where the essay truly takes its stand within political philosophy.
The standard question is not "the future has no legitimacy over the present." We do have legitimate intergenerational obligations — constitutional inheritance, public debt, treaties — and these belong to (O). The problem is this: even if contractarian and deliberative designs can be extended across time, the legitimacy they produce is still (O)-shaped (bounded obligation / the future as a consideration); it never reaches the MPF shape (priority / sovereignty). MPF usurps a legitimacy it has no title to.
Why? Because all the standard grounds of modern legitimacy — consent, reciprocity, deliberation, public reason — presuppose co-presence.
This is not a metaphysical assertion but a consequence of the conceptual structure of legitimacy relations themselves: consent requires an object to be consented to; reciprocity requires two parties able to give and receive; deliberation requires participants able to take up one another's reasons; public reason requires citizens who hold one another accountable. These activities, by their very nature, require parties capable of conversing with one another — not as an empirical limitation but as part of what these activities are. A party that is necessarily absent, that cannot be conversed with, cannot respond, and cannot be held accountable or hold others to account, cannot in this constitutive sense be a party to legitimacy; it can at most be represented. And representation here is projection: the representative decides what the absent party would say.
The legitimacy of the future is therefore always mediated, never direct — and mediation reintroduces the problem of malleability, for the "voice" of the future is always a present voice spoken through its mouth.
Three kinds of absence must be distinguished. (a) Spatial absence — citizens abroad, residents who cannot vote: the absent party exists, can be conversed with, retains the capacity to object. (b) Past absence — what Jefferson called "the dead hand": the previous generation once existed, did consent or not consent, and left a recoverable record. (c) Future absence — the target of this essay: future persons do not exist, cannot be conversed with, cannot object, leave no recoverable record of consent or refusal.
The difference between (c) and (a)(b) is categorial. Constitutional inheritance and public debt are (O)-legitimate, because the persons they involve once were or could be co-present; MPF is illegitimate, because the persons it involves are absent in a constitutive sense. Co-presence is the condition of sovereign legitimacy — the right to override — but not the condition of all obligatory consideration. The future can be the object of an obligation (O); it cannot be a party to legitimacy in the strong sense.
So what this essay truly asks is not "what do we owe the future" (a question Rawls, Parfit, and Jonas have already discussed well), but "by what right does the future rule the present" — a temporal direction that the tradition of legitimacy theory has scarcely touched. The existing literature concentrates on the past → present "dead hand" (Jefferson: "the earth belongs in usufruct to the living") and on the present → future instrumentalization (Habermas's worry that genetic programming treats future persons as means). What this essay names is the symmetrical, unspoken direction: future → present. Habermas saw that temporal asymmetry is a problem of legitimacy, but he saw only half of it.
The Mechanisms of Inflation
MPF inflates from (O) into a hegemony by way of three mechanisms.
First, quantitative inflation. The equal-weight proposition is harmless in itself, but multiplied by "the future may contain trillions of people," any present cost can be "offset" by a sufficiently large future benefit. Aggregate utility calculation here loses its stopping rule: present suffering is "worth it" relative to future welfare on a trillion-person scale. This is precisely the illegitimate inter-temporal aggregation forbidden by the first layer of the ground. Its formal mark is this: a future-based claim has inflated into a hegemony if and only if there is no present cost that it cannot justify.
Second, temporal asymmetry is converted into privilege. Jonas's "asymmetry of responsibility" — that the future cannot speak — was meant to protect the future. But in institutional operation, this "absence" is converted into the source of privilege: precisely because future persons are empty, not-yet-existent, anything can be projected onto them (utopia, growth, national renewal, the singularity), and they become an infinitely malleable moral creditor that any ideology may invoke to justify any present arrangement. Meanwhile, present victims are devalued, re-encoded as "short-sighted," "selfish."
A paradoxical inversion: the silent future acquires a monopoly on voice, while the vocal present is silenced.
Third, the sign of the discount is reversed. Classical economics discounts the future with a positive rate of time preference. Contemporary "future finance" and longtermist discourse reverse the sign into a premium, because value compounds in the future, and the future is the source of meaning. This is not a mathematical detail but a civilizational shift in the center of gravity of meaning: the future is no longer something that arrives; it is the sacred object toward which sacrifice is directed.
Four operational criteria. A claim that invokes the future crosses the line from (O) to MPF if it meets any of the following:
- Unboundedness — it can justify present sacrifice at any scale, with no stopping rule.
- Exemption — present cost is excluded from moral scrutiny (sacrifice is re-encoded as "investment").
- Malleability — the future is invoked with indeterminate content or indeterminate claimants (an empty signifier).
- Dissent-reframing — critics are not answered but redescribed as "short-sighted" or as "betraying the future."
A legitimate future obligation meets none of them.
996 and the "Faith Premium"
Two examples.
Overwork. A joint WHO/ILO estimate links working more than 55 hours per week to approximately 745,000 deaths worldwide in 2016 (from ischemic heart disease and stroke), up about 29 percent from 2000. In fiscal year 2024, Japan recognized 1,304 claims for karoshi-related labor accidents (including deaths from cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease and suicide from overwork), a record high. China's "996" (about 72 hours per week), although ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 2021, remains widespread.
The discursive grammar of overwork is precisely the operation of MPF: it is usually not framed as "cost" but re-encoded as "struggle," "investing in one's own career" — exactly criteria (2) (exemption) and (4) (dissent-reframing). Han Byung-Chul puts it precisely: the "achievement subject" of contemporary capitalism is structurally self-exploiting; external coercion is internalized as the injunction "you can," so that 996 is experienced as self-driven striving rather than imposed extraction. The four criteria operate here with particular clarity: unboundedness — provided the "future" (career, company, nation) justifies it, working hours may climb to any height; exemption — the damage to health and death are re-encoded as "investment" and exit moral scrutiny, and those 745,000 are invisible within the discourse that produces them; malleability — "the future" is indeterminate, and may refer to personal success, corporate growth, or national competitiveness, depending on who is speaking; dissent-reframing — those who resist overwork are labeled "lazy," "lacking ambition," "betraying the team."
The "faith premium" in valuation. The price of a stock is the discounted sum of all its future cash flows. The smaller the present earnings relative to expectations of long-term growth, the more "long-duration" the asset, and the more purely its price expresses a faith in the future. In the AI wave, certain assets trading at very high price-to-sales ratios (around 25×) carry discounted-cash-flow models in which the price exceeds even optimistic forecasts — they carry a considerable "faith premium." Analysts and investors who question this premium are routinely re-encoded as "not understanding the long-term logic" or as "missing the paradigm shift" — dissent is dissolved into ignorance, exactly the pattern MPF predicts. "Future priority" is priced, literally, onto the balance sheet.
Content-Neutrality: Growth and Environmentalism Can Be the Same Disease
A sharp challenge: consider two propositions — for the sake of future economic development, today's environment may be sacrificed (pollute first, clean up later); for the sake of the future environment, today's development may be sacrificed (mandatory decarbonization, shutdowns). The two point in opposite directions, yet they share the form of MPF: both justify present sacrifice in the name of the future. If MPF holds at both poles, does that not render it empty?
The answer: the two-sidedness is precisely what most sharply exhibits the character of MPF as a structural concept.
First, the two-sidedness confirms malleability. The future is an empty signifier: growth can be projected onto it, and so can ecology. This is exactly the source of MPF's danger — it can be invoked by any content. What the two sides share is not a conclusion but a structure of argument: both presuppose that "the future has priority." It is like "the national security argument" — "for national security, monitor the internet" and "for national security, do not monitor the internet" yield opposite conclusions, yet both belong to the national security argument form, because both grant national security the highest priority.
Second, MPF is a structural concept, not a content concept. Just as "authoritarianism" can appear in left-wing and right-wing regimes alike (its holding at both poles does not render it empty but indicates that it is concerned with how power is exercised, not who exercises it), MPF is concerned with how the future is invoked (unbounded, exempt, malleable, dissent-reframing), not which future content is correct.
The real discriminating standard is a structural, second-order distinction. A policy that consists in bounded non-harm (limited to not destroying the conditions of life), in which present costs are scrutinized and compensated (non-exempt), the claimant is determinate, and questioning is open, is (O), and is compatible with (F). A policy that, unboundedly, exemptedly, indeterminately, and in a manner resistant to questioning, extracts from the present in the name of the future is MPF. (F) does the discriminating work here: it asks not "which future is more worthy" but "whether present persons are being treated as costs reducible to a future aggregate."
Self-Disintegration: The Collapse of the Birth Rate
South Korea's total fertility rate fell to 0.72 in 2023 (the lowest in the world, far below the replacement level of 2.1), despite the government pouring in some $270 billion in incentives; in 2024 it edged up to 0.75, and East Asia as a whole remains mired in a structural fertility crisis.
To have a child is, in essence, a vote on the future: to bring a person into the world is to believe that the future is worth experiencing. MPF presupposes the premise that "the future is worth believing in," and the collapse of fertility symbolically enacts the withdrawal of that very premise. Hartog has named this the disintegration of the modern, future-oriented regime of historicity: when the future is no longer creditable and the past no longer authorizing, only an inflated present remains — a "presentism" that is the dialectical counterpart of MPF's future-sovereignty.
MPF is therefore not only deficient in justice (it violates F) but structurally self-disintegrating in its own logic: its social efficacy depends on a residual future-confidence that supplies rhetorical force to invocations of the future; and it is precisely the withdrawal of this confidence that is symbolically executed by the decline of fertility and the erosion of faith in the future. A 2025 Pew survey found that in most countries surveyed, majorities expect their children's lives to be worse than their own; the Harvard Youth Poll (spring 2026) reports that only 13 percent of American youth believe the country is on the right track, down from 36 percent in 2021.
A Triple Refusal
The position of this essay is therefore a triple refusal: a refusal of MPF (the sovereignty of the future); a refusal of presentism ((F) retains (O); the critique is not "enjoy the present"); and a refusal of content-substitution schemes — in particular, a refusal of "pure/reformist degrowth" (content-neutrality means that substituting the content does not escape the structure). The autonomous-radical tradition of degrowth (Castoriadis's collective self-limitation; Saito's "degrowth communism" insofar as its core is a present reorganization of the metabolic) is an exception: its root lies in the collective autonomy and self-limitation of the present, not in future ecological redemption, and therefore does not necessarily reintroduce deferred salvation.
[Editor's Note] The insight of MPF can in fact be translated into a more everyday judgment. Everyone who has been told "for the sake of the future you must endure the present" — endure 996, endure austerity, endure an unjust arrangement — has felt an inarticulate discomfort: you know that something is wrong, but you cannot say what, because the other stands on the commanding height of "the future" while you stand in "the present," and by nature you are a head shorter. What this essay does is give that discomfort a precise name, and then ask: who granted that commanding height? Whence the legitimacy? The answer is unsettling: no one granted it. The future rules the present not by bestowed authority but by a structure of argument — a covert transfer of the burden of proof. The moment you see this structure, it has largely lost its power. Because at last you can ask: by what right?
The Open Question
(F) and content-neutrality, taken together, leave a profound question. If the future no longer holds infinite priority, if the structure of "deferred salvation" is shaking across multiple dimensions, then — how is a meaning and a politics possible that neither depends on faith in progress nor reintroduces deferred salvation?
If tomorrow will not automatically be better, why is today worth living?
This essay does not pretend to answer that question. That is the open frontier of a long-term project. But it can mark out the constraints any acceptable answer must meet: (a) it must not depend on faith in progress, nor lapse into nihilism or conservatism; (b) it must operate at the level of political economy, not merely personal ethics (MPF is structural; personal "being present" cannot meet it); (c) it must not reintroduce deferred salvation — which excludes any program rooted in "some future state"; (d) it must answer Scheffler's challenge.
Directions that may meet these constraints include: the democratization of the time horizon; Castoriadis's collective self-limitation as autonomy (a people for itself deciding the bounds of its activity, not in the name of some future state but as a practice of present self-governance); Illich's "tool conviviality" (tools and institutions held below a counter-productivity threshold, so that the present is not swallowed by its own apparatus); or Arendt's reordering of the priority of action (present, plural, the capacity to begin) over process (the endless economic-historical machine).
Back to the original question. If tomorrow will not automatically be better, why is today worth living?
The answer this essay gives is: take that question back from "the future." It should not be answered by a time that has not yet arrived; it should be answered by present persons, by virtue of their irreducible moral standing, within a community of action, mutual recognition, and self-limitation. Once the tyranny of the future is recognized, what it has deprived us of is not only the costs of the present, but a right that belongs to the present — the right to answer, for ourselves, the meaning of our own lives.