Adequate Justification

Summary

An adequate justification is a person-directed justification available to a particular holder for conduct that leaves that holder's claim unsatisfied. It is a standard of justification, not a grant of permission by the holder. It requires neither prior authorization nor eventual acceptance, and it can never settle the account in the holder's name.

The module supplies content to the framework's demand that conduct be justifiable to each affected party. A justification must address the actual claim, preserve the holder as a party, cite claims rather than totals or appetites, survive comparison, and remain open in form. On the proposed criterial role of these conditions, an act is justified only if an adequate justification is available for every claim it leaves unsatisfied.

Theory position: diagnostic theory · derived, defended, proposed, and open · source framework, reconstruction, clarification, and completion.

Depends on: Answerability · Account · Claim Grounds · Comparison Discipline · Provision Claims · Possession · The Holder's Good.

Standard, not grant

The critique of tacit, hypothetical, retroactive, and manufactured consent defeats counterfeit grants. It does not show that every act lacking authorization is unjustified. A standard can govern conduct where no holder performed a grant, provided the standard does not present itself as the holder's exercise or eventual acquittal.

Adequacy therefore changes the status of conduct, not the holder's jurisdiction. It can show why an unsatisfied claim was justifiably overridden. It cannot create consent, release, forgiveness, or settlement.

Conditions

A justification J for option X is adequate to affected party P only if all five conditions hold.

1. Keyed. J engages P's claim at its actual content: the burden as P bears it, across the relevant dimensions of P's good, ordering, and cumulative position. A generic role occupant or an aggregate into which P has been folded is not the addressee.

2. Party-preserving. X, toward P, lacks the three-mark structure of possession. This condition is derived given possession's defended address argument. A reader who rejects that argument can instead treat possession as the framework's gravest burden, but loses its categorical ineligibility.

3. Claim-grounded. What J cites against P's claim must be claims of identifiable someones. Provision claims qualify where their holder, ground, and content have been established. A claimless total, institutional appetite, preference as such, prestige, or growth as such does not.

4. Comparatively vindicated. X must survive Comparison Discipline with P's claim entered at full content and gravity. The comparison stage can select, tie, or remain unresolved; adequacy cannot convert an unresolved output into a vindication. The relevance band's placement and the graver-versus-more-numerous open cell therefore remain limits on this condition.

5. Open in form. J acknowledges P's claim as unsatisfied, contains no claim that the matter is thereby settled for P, and does not depend on concealment. A justification that works only while hidden from the party it purports to answer fails as an address.

An act is justified if, for every claim it leaves unsatisfied, an adequate justification is available to that claim's holder. Satisfaction needs no override; wronging occurs where a claim is left unsatisfied and no adequate justification is available.

Availability and the account

Availability is distinct from delivery. A justification can be available before it is spoken, while account duties govern conduct, records, explanation, acknowledgment, and contest.

For a discrete past act, later refusal to give the account is a new wrong. It does not retroactively change a justified act into an unjustified one, but sustained refusal supports an inference that no adequate justification existed and shifts the evidential burden.

For a continuing arrangement, contest and account can be part of ongoing adequacy. An arrangement whose burden was justified partly by effective contest ceases to satisfy that justification during periods in which contest is foreclosed.

In an emergency, performance may be deferred where the necessity is genuine. Deferral is not excuse: it must be as short as the necessity, and the record and account remain owed afterward.

Judgment without a tribunal

Adequacy is independent of the actor's self-certification and of the addressee's acceptance. Self-certification would let the answerable party become its own standard; acceptance as a veto would make every burden impossible and would invite manufactured endorsement.

The addressee nevertheless has evidential priority on whether the justification is keyed to their claim. Their contest shifts the burden until the claim is answered through a route the justifier does not control. A holder's valid exercises remain constitutive: they change claim content within their scope rather than merely supplying evidence to the adequacy judgment.

No tribunal is made infallible by assessing these conditions. Adequacy is a property of a justification; institutional findings about it remain contestable.

Limits

The comparative condition inherits comparison's defended counting rule, proposed relevance band, and unresolved open cell.
The party-preserving condition carries the defended status of possession's address argument.
The criteria were articulated by the theory itself. Corrigibility and independent contest are the framework's posture toward the standard-fixing regress, not a proof that the standard has authority.
An adequate justification does not erase the differentiated residue generated by an unsatisfied claim.

Answerability · Account · Claim Grounds · Provision Claims · The Holder's Good · Possession · Comparison Discipline · Residue · Settlement · Open Questions