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Progress as a moral alibi to justify power abuses and structurally produced violence

Jacques Ellul warned that the technification of human relations tends toward autonomy, escaping ethical and political control. Today, this autonomy no longer functions primarily as a promise of emancipation but as a moral alibi. Technological and economic acceleration are increasingly invoked to justify the harms they produce, presenting them as unavoidable consequences of an impersonal process rather than outcomes of deliberate human choice. Responsibility is displaced from agents to abstractions such as progress, innovation, or system logic, making ethical evaluation difficult and allowing structural harm to persist without clear accountability. Ellul’s concern resonates with a broader theoretical lineage, from Marx’s analysis of productive forces to Weber’s account of rationalization, each identifying mechanisms through which responsibility becomes diffuse under modern conditions.

The idea of progress has long been treated as a natural trajectory of history. Enlightenment thought framed social development as teleological, oriented toward refinement, reason, and improvement. Marx later situated progress in the evolution of productive forces, emphasizing how material capacities shape historical possibility. In contemporary discourse, progress is embedded institutionally and linguistically as a self-justifying motor. Terms such as transition, innovation, and next phase frame change as inevitable, disarming moral opposition by casting resistance as irrational or regressive. One need not actively believe in progress for it to operate. The narrative itself structures the field of acceptable action, ensuring that critique appears futile or obstructive.

Progress functions as an impersonal, cumulative force enabled by expanding productive forces. Although closely linked to technology, the concept predates industrialization and remains fundamentally normative. At its core, progress frames change as movement toward a perceived improvement or desired state. This framing matters because once change is presented as both desirable and necessary, suffering is rendered a cost rather than a failure. Power appears not as a site of decision but as administration of what must occur. Progress thus operates not as a neutral descriptor but as a narrative that confers moral cover, legitimizing harm while obscuring the role of agency. The tension between inevitability and choice remains central: progress presents itself as autonomous, yet it is sustained by human decisions and political priorities.

Within this framework, agents can pursue projects that generate harm while presenting them as unavoidable steps toward improvement. Large-scale initiatives such as urban redevelopment, automation, or extractive industries routinely produce displacement, environmental damage, and labor exploitation. Framed through the narrative of progress, these harms become legible not as failures or injustices but as necessary costs of advancement. Ethical scrutiny shifts away from decision-makers and toward abstract historical or technological logics. Harms that threaten the legitimacy of progress may be acknowledged, but only insofar as they can be reframed as opportunities for further innovation or acceleration.

At the structural level, this logic becomes more entrenched. Policies and institutions generate predictable harms, including inequality, ecological degradation, and social displacement, yet these outcomes are treated as stages in societal advancement rather than consequences of choice. The productive forces, understood as the material and organizational capacities driving expansion, provide both the means and the justification for morally fraught actions. As technological systems accelerate, decisions that once required political deliberation are recast as technical necessities. Environmental destruction, surveillance, automation of labor, and extractive exploitation appear dictated by system logic rather than human agency. Here Marx’s insight remains instructive: material conditions shape not only what is possible, but how responsibility itself is perceived and obscured.

Violence enacted under the banner of progress rarely enters moral or political debate as violence. Structural harms are treated as consequences of historical imperatives rather than acts requiring justification. The narrative of progress supplies implicit moral authorization, allowing agents to act without explicit defense. Language reinforces this effect by embedding harm within the discourse of advancement, transforming ethical failures into expected stages of development and further insulating decision-makers from accountability.

Progress not only abstracts harm but actively relocates responsibility for it. Language recasts ethically charged decisions as neutral or technical, allowing agents to speak around responsibility rather than confront it. Responsibility is also displaced temporally. Harms produced in the present, including environmental damage, social displacement, and labor exploitation, are framed as investments in a better future. The future is treated as morally authoritative, while present suffering is rendered secondary. Finally, productive forces themselves are invoked as constraints, making outcomes appear imposed rather than chosen. Through these mechanisms, responsibility is diffused across time and structure, transforming preventable harm into impersonal consequence while preserving the legitimacy of progress.

In this sense, progress functions as a moral sink. Harms generated by political, economic, or technological decisions are absorbed into an abstract narrative of advancement, where they lose their capacity to generate accountability. Suffering does not disappear, but its moral weight is displaced, diffused, and neutralized by being re-framed as necessity, transition, or future benefit. Once harm enters this sink, it is no longer treated as an ethical failure requiring redress, but as an expected byproduct of development itself. Responsibility drains away from identifiable agents and institutions, settling instead into an impersonal logic that no one fully controls and therefore no one is fully answerable to.

This dynamic explains how progress can acknowledge harm while rendering it politically inert. Environmental destruction, displacement, and labor exploitation are recognized, yet their moral force is absorbed by the moral sink, where critique loses traction and accountability dissolves. Progress maintains its authority not by denying harm, but by processing it in a way that preserves the legitimacy of the system that produces it.

A defining feature of progress as a moral narrative is its self-reinforcing logic. When projects fail or generate unforeseen harms, the response is rarely reconsideration. Instead, failure is met with intensified progress, as if further acceleration or technical refinement alone could resolve contradictions produced by earlier decisions. Missteps are subsumed into the narrative, reinforcing the perception of inevitability and moral necessity. The system appears autonomous, yet it is sustained by continuous choices that are shielded from ethical scrutiny.

Central to this logic is the elevation of the future over the present. Harms experienced today are framed as regrettable but acceptable costs for a morally superior tomorrow. Policy decisions and technological deployments are justified by projected benefits, granting the future normative authority over present ethical claims. Present victims are rendered abstract and expendable, subordinated to anticipated outcomes. By privileging the future, progress completes the cycle in which harm is legitimized and responsibility deferred.

A common objection holds that belief in progress is not a moral alibi but an empirical inference. Societies may tolerate present harms not to evade responsibility, but because historical experience suggests that long-term progress reduces overall suffering. Short-term costs may be understood as rational trade-offs justified by anticipated improvements in health, prosperity, or opportunity. From this perspective, agents are not absolving themselves of responsibility but making evidence-based decisions across time.

Yet even when framed empirically, this reasoning reproduces the same moral structure. Present harms are subordinated to projected futures, and ethical evaluation is deferred rather than confronted. Empirical justification often relies on selective indicators such as growth or productivity, while displacement, exploitation, and ecological damage remain structurally obscured. Appeals to long-term benefit foreclose reconsideration in the present by treating harm as necessary. Rationalized trade-offs therefore continue to operate within a logic of inevitability. Progress retains its moral cover even when justified as empirical prudence rather than ideological faith.

Conclusion

Progress operates not merely as a measure of improvement but as a narrative with moral and political authority. By framing harm as inevitable, deferring responsibility to the future, and presenting systemic outcomes as impersonal necessity, it enables structural violence while insulating agents from accountability. Its self-reinforcing logic ensures that failure prompts further acceleration rather than ethical reflection, and that present suffering is subordinated to projected benefit. Critiquing progress is not a rejection of improvement, but a refusal to accept narratives that naturalize harm and obscure responsibility. Without such scrutiny, progress risks perpetuating violence while concealing the human choices that sustain it.