How can actors use the future to politically navigate moral disputes today? This article examines how projected futures are constructed and mobilised to suspend present-day moral dilemmas. Utilising the Economies of Worth and Barbara Adam’s sociology of time, we discursively analyse the moral dilemma between civic virtues and financial savings in UK healthcare austerity (2010–2018). This reveals how the pro-austerity government avoided moral scrutiny of their posited solutions to apparently intractable moral struggles using future projections we term ‘promissory futures’. Promissory futures project desirable futures that ambiguously seem both secured enough to be reliable, and open enough to escape today’s moral dilemmas. Thus, government could use them to shift the temporal focus away from present-day moral critique of how they were balancing austerity’s financial savings against civic virtues, and into a future where savings and civic virtues were compatible. However, promissory futures contain a contradiction: the future cannot be both already-secured and still-open. Thus, critics could eventually deconstruct promissory futures, requiring government to repeatedly reconstruct them. There thus emerges less a definitive moral settle- ment and more a continual process of moral settl- ing, whereby a series of promissory futures together forestall critique of underlying settlements, thus delaying moral struggles’ denouements.

中文翻译：

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构建承诺期货以推迟道德审查：医疗紧缩的困境


行动者如何利用未来在政治上解决当今的道德争议？本文探讨了如何构建和动员预期的未来来解决当今的道德困境。利用价值经济和芭芭拉·亚当的时间社会学，我们论述性地分析了英国医疗紧缩（2010-2018）中公民美德和财务储蓄之间的道德困境。这揭示了支持紧缩的政府如何利用我们称之为“承诺的未来”的未来预测，避免对其提出的解决方案进行道德审查，以解决明显棘手的道德斗争。期许的未来预示着理想的未来，这些未来模糊地似乎既足够安全可靠，又足够开放以摆脱当今的道德困境。因此，政府可以利用它们将时间焦点从当前对如何平衡紧缩财政储蓄与公民美德的道德批评转移到储蓄与公民美德兼容的未来。然而，本票期货存在一个矛盾：未来不可能既是有保障的又是开放的。因此，批评者最终可能会解构期约期货，要求政府反复重建它们。因此，出现的不是一个明确的道德解决方案，而是一个持续的道德解决过程，通过一系列有希望的未来，共同阻止对潜在解决方案的批评，从而延迟道德斗争的结局。