Authority Across Time

Summary

Authority across time governs how a holder's present exercises, prior exercises, settled cares, and current claims relate when they do not all point in the same direction. The rules protect a valid exercise from being replaced by biography, while preventing a prior exercise from becoming unlimited authority over every later circumstance or manner of implementation.

The order matters. A valid present exercise governs what it addresses. A valid prior exercise governs within its interpreted scope. Inferred ordering fills only the gaps. Present claims constrain implementation even where they do not repeal the substance of a prior exercise.

Theory position: diagnostic theory · defended and open · reconstruction and clarification.

Depends on: Authorization · The Holder's Good · Settlement.

Present exercise

An explicit, valid, present exercise governs what it addresses outright. A holder's biography cannot overrule it on the ground that the choice is uncharacteristic, imprudent, or inconsistent with the life others recognize. Biographical continuity is evidence for cases in which no exercise speaks, not a court over a present one.

Validity remains the gate. The holder must have the relevant capacity, and the exercise must be free and unmanufactured under Authorization. A declaration produced by pressure, engineered necessity, deception, or an interested party's capture fails at validity; it is not defeated merely because it does not fit the life.

Prior exercise and scope

A valid prior exercise governs what it addressed, within its scope. Scope is fixed by the exercise's text, stated purpose, contemplated circumstances, and distinctions the holder is known to have drawn. It is interpreted case by case rather than assigned by the general category of consent, refusal, will, or directive.

Where an exercise genuinely does not reach the present circumstance, the gap is not filled by a counterfeit exercise. A proxy's reconstruction of what the holder would have wanted may be evidence about settled cares; it is not a performance by the holder and cannot be treated as one.

Performed Exercises and the Dead develops the narrower result that later incapacity or death does not unperform a valid exercise. This page supplies the prior question: what the exercise actually addressed.

Inferred ordering

Where no valid exercise governs, the holder's settled cares guide the description of the holder's good. The evidence is the shape of the life and its durable commitments, not declarations produced for the dispute. Inference remains defeasible and falls under the proxy discipline wherever the holder cannot contest it.

Inferred ordering never promotes itself into authorization. It helps describe the claim that must be answered; it does not manufacture the holder's consent, refusal, waiver, or release.

Present claims and implementation

A prior exercise can fix the substance of what is to be done while the present holder's experiential claims govern manner, timing, and palliation. This distinction prevents two opposite errors: ignoring present suffering because a directive exists, and treating any present discomfort as if it erased the directive.

At the limit, an implementation that could proceed only through sustained grave experiential harm can be defeated as that implementation by the present claim. The prior exercise is not declared void; a different manner, timing, or route may remain required. The comparison is between claims of one holder and does not invoke an external verdict on the worth of the holder's life.

How grave present harm must be, and how duration, reversibility, and changing capacity affect its weight against a prior exercise, remain open. The distinction locates the problem without resolving it.

Interpretation under constraint

Interpretation follows the proxy discipline. A party who benefits from a reading of the exercise or of the holder's present state is barred from certifying that reading, and the interpretation must remain contestable through a route the beneficiary does not control.

This discipline does not install a neutral tribunal. It distributes a burden of justification and requires routes of correction; whether an institution provides either in practice is an empirical question.

Limits

The page gives priority rules, not a complete theory of capacity, coercion, or manufactured exercises.
The threshold at which present experiential harm defeats an implementation is unresolved theory of diachronic weight.
Scope interpretation can remain indeterminate after the relevant text, purpose, circumstances, and distinctions are considered.
These are philosophical rules for claim structure, not legal rules for wills, directives, treatment, or guardianship.

Authorization · The Holder's Good · Claim Grounds · Performed Exercises and the Dead · Standing-Based End-of-Life Ethics · Settlement · Open Questions