Progress has been the main motor of capitalist society since the dawn of the industrial-age. Actually, it has always been a common pattern in human civilization. In late-stage capitalism, it has become the last standing stone justifying its course and as proof of this : progress is used to justify structural and systemic violence which no ethical framework can produce moral cover for it anymore. The ever-lasting course for compounded mass production are now wrapped in colloquial marketing terms : the “next phase”, “innovation” or “transition”. People no longer need to endorse progress for it to continue its evolution. Everybody bought a ticket and is playing by its rules. Progress isn’t a moral entity in and of itself, but rather, instead of flying to the moon, is hiding under a moral alibi whereas the future will ‘prove’ its efficacy and salutary nature. Essentially we are arguing that progress now functions less as a promise than as a moral alibi, neutralizing responsibility for structurally produced harm.
Progress is the course forward, where to ? Nobody exactly knows : it is self-justifying, and the consumers are the fuel for the rocket. 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. This philosophical point of reference hasn’t changed much at present, but instead of being a pretext for unregulated progress, now it is just the old underlying definition. It isn’t a measurable metric, we define progress here as a narrative that frames change as inherently directional, cumulative and self-justifying, a trajectory needing the expanding of productive forces for it to continue on forward. And the only way is forward, why would you want to sit back and scratch your head, thinking of an alternative ? The narrative itself structures the field of acceptable action, ensuring that critique appears futile or obstructive. 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. Progress does not act; it is invoked by those who do. Those who benefit from progress displace responsibility onto consumers, workers, and abstract systems.
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 labour 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 israel-palestine conflict becomes an old stick and stone fight which progress will shift to ancient history and replace it by a new civilized order. 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 in the name of progress is attributed to politicians, Mister Trump can invade any country for the good of the American people, while the billion dollar companies operating progress shirk their responsibility from being part of structurally produced violence. Otherwise the system would be legitimately condemnable and the doxa would fail.
The narrative of progress uses a moral alibi : the future will even it out. The negative outcomes of our great leap forward will be fixed in an undefined future that can be nothing other than great. Thus progress not only abstracts harm but actively relocates responsibility for it. It is displaced temporally, 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. What emerges are mechanisms through which harm is acknowledged yet rendered ethically inert. 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. “We haven’t done anything, we’re just going forward.”
This dynamic explains how progress can acknowledge harm while rendering it politically inert. Environmental destruction, displacement, and labour 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. When progress fails or generate harm that outweighs its foreseen positive outcomes, the answer is more progress. It is now the mono-lingual idiom of late-stage capitalism. Though 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.
Now with AI, the key to reverse this narrative on itself and make it impenetrable and invincible has unlocked a door where poor ethical decision-makers no longer need to touch the pedals. A system of probability and pure logic can be unleashed to finally be tangibly autonomous. Now, decision-makers can blame artificial intelligence for the harmful progress they’ve pushed on the rails, the very AI they created. With AI, the circle is completed: responsibility no longer needs to be denied, only delegated.
Progress thus survives not by preventing violence, but by absorbing it into a narrative where no one remains fully accountable.
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