Authorization

Summary

To be authorized by someone, in Standing and Answerability Ethics, is to hold their permission for an act: their say-so, given in advance, is the source of the act's warrant. Authorization is an exercise of standing, and therefore requires a holder who exists, understands what is being granted, and grants it freely. Its defining constraint is temporal: permission cannot precede the existence of the one who would give it, and cannot be supplied afterward on their behalf.

Two consequences organize the page. First, no beginning can be authorized by the one it begins, and the standard devices for repairing missing consent — tacit, hypothetical, and implied consent — each fail to supply genuine authorization. Second, the one legitimate form of proxy consent, stewardship, works precisely because it is the opposite of settlement: it keeps the ward's account open rather than closing it.

Claim status: the definition and temporal constraint are conceptual analysis; the failure of the consent-repairs is a derived argument, conditional on treating authorization as an exercise (see Registers of Claim).

Definition

Authorization transfers warrant. Acting with a party's permission means the act's standing toward them no longer rests solely on one's own judgment of their good; they have made the act, in the relevant respect, their own. Three conditions follow from its being an exercise:

Existence. The grantor must exist at the time of the grant.
Capacity. The grantor must understand what is being granted.
Freedom. A yes produced by necessity is a surrender, not a grant; the inability to refuse is not consent (Infrastructuralization).

The contrast with answerability is fundamental and treated fully on that page: a standard an act must meet may be applied after the act; a grantor must precede it. One can therefore be fully answerable to a party who never authorized anything — the framework's recurring situation.

Why missing authorization cannot be repaired

Where an arrangement holds people it was never authorized by — paradigmatically, the state and the family — three repair devices are traditionally offered. On the framework's analysis, each supplies something authorization-shaped that lacks authorization's essential feature: an actual grant by the holder.

Tacit consent (remaining counts as agreeing). Staying signals agreement only where leaving was a live option. Where exit is unaffordable, dangerous, or leads only into an equivalent arrangement, remaining reflects the cost of the exit, not the will of the one who remains.
Hypothetical consent (they would have agreed). A well-supported prediction about a grant is still not a grant. Exercises are constituted by the holder's performance; a counterfactual performance authorizes nothing.
Implied or periodic consent (participation, elections). The framework rates this the most serious device: real accountability, and far better than nothing. But it arrives long after the formation it is meant to license, and it is given by people whose judgment the arrangement itself helped form — an approval the arrangement cannot then treat as an independent grant.

The conclusion is deliberately limited: these failures do not show unauthorized arrangements to be illegitimate. They show that if such arrangements are legitimate, their legitimacy cannot consist in consent. The framework's constructive alternative — permanent accountability precisely where authorization was never possible — is the defended position at Standing Answerability.

Stewardship: legitimate proxy consent

Ordinary practice includes proxy consent that no serious ethics condemns: a parent consenting to an infant's surgery, a guardian signing for a ward. If exercises require a capable holder, how is this possible — and why can the same device not authorize a beginning?

The framework's answer distinguishes two acts that look alike and run in opposite directions.

Stewardship is consent given (a) provisionally, (b) under the standard of the ward's own good, (c) subject to revision, and (d) — decisively — while remaining answerable afterward to the ward in whose name it was given. A grown ward can demand an account of what was consented to on their behalf, and is owed one. Stewardship therefore does not violate the exercise requirement; it is an act performed in trust that preserves the ward's position as the party still owed answers.

Settlement is the act that would extinguish that position: a matter closed in advance, in the proxy's favor, immune to the ward's later demand for an account (Settlement).

The resulting rule: proxy consent is legitimate exactly insofar as it keeps the represented party's account open, and illegitimate exactly where it would close it. A beginning cannot be authorized by proxy for this reason — not because proxies are inherently suspect, but because "authorizing a beginning" would mean closing, in advance and on another's behalf, the one account the framework holds cannot be closed. Correspondingly, stewardship is abused whenever a past proxy consent is later invoked as a debt (I decided for you; you owe me): that invocation converts stewardship into claimed settlement and fails with it.

The counterfeit exercise

The failures above instantiate a pattern the framework tracks across domains: treating an unavailable exercise as though it had been performed. Recurring forms include reading a child's flourishing as retroactive permission for their beginning; reading citizens' formed approval as founding consent; reading an animal's inability to refuse as acceptance of its use; and training an artificial system to voice the authorization it could never give (Standing-Based Ethics of Artificial Minds). The framework's uniform response: where authorization was structurally unavailable, no permission exists anywhere in the situation, and the relation runs instead on answerability — undiminished, and without expiry (Answerability).

Limits

The derived results are conditional on the exercise analysis of authorization; a critic who holds that genuine permission can be constructed from hypothetical or representative devices rejects that premise at the root.
The critique of implied consent does not entail that elections and participation lack value; the framework denies only that they constitute founding authorization.
Where the boundary of "capacity" lies — at what point a maturing ward's own exercises supersede stewardship — is left to the applied pages and remains case-dependent.

Answerability · Settlement · Standing · Newness · Standing Answerability

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