The Future Self as Beneficiary: Future Exploitation and Retaliatory Foreclosure

Abstract

Why should a benefit available only in the future bind the present bearer of its cost? Research on intertemporal choice explains future-oriented action through delayed reward, trust, episodic prospection, and psychological connectedness to a future self. This article develops retaliatory foreclosure (RF), a conceptual model of one possible reason for suicide. RF requires four jointly necessary elements: an aversive future; the construal of present maintenance as provision to a future self; the exclusion of that future self from present practical concern; and an intention to prevent its receipt as deprivation rather than merely to escape a burden. The model distinguishes causal and experiential nonretroactivity from the contested practical and normative attribution of later benefit. It therefore does not infer that future goods cannot matter now merely because they do not travel backward in time. Its narrower claim is that an agent can withdraw practical inclusion while acknowledging numerical identity, producing a locally consistent means-end structure in which cessation acquires retaliatory meaning. This establishes neither soundness, prevalence, sufficiency for action, nor moral permissibility. RF differs from hopelessness, escape, self-punishment, future-self disconnection, and interpersonal revenge through the conjunction of beneficiary construal, practical exclusion, and value placed on nonreceipt. A decisive empirical test would manipulate beneficiary-role framing independently of future-self valence and connectedness and measure deprivation value separately from burden avoidance. The framework is not a diagnosis, risk tool, or intervention, and its articulation requires explicit containment because description may alter the reasons available to agents.