Authorization
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Summary
To be authorized by someone is to hold permission produced by that holder's valid exercise. Authorization changes the claim structure because the holder has actually performed a grant; it is not a prediction that they would grant, a description of their good, or an approval supplied in their name by another.
Authorization is distinct from answerability. A grantor must exist and perform before or during the authorized conduct. A standard of answerability can govern conduct never authorized by its holder. The difference is why missing consent cannot be repaired by hypothetical, tacit, retroactive, or manufactured agreement.
Valid performed exercises
The act of authorizing is one exercise of standing. In this page's technical vocabulary, authorization names the permission that a valid authorizing exercise produces. Other exercises include consenting, refusing, promising, directing, releasing, waiving, and forgiving. A valid exercise requires:
- Existence: the holder exists when the exercise is performed.
- Capacity: the holder can understand and perform the exercise in question.
- Freedom: coercion or an engineered inability to refuse does not produce a grant.
- Non-manufacture: the addressee has not built or captured the standpoint whose declaration it invokes.
Validity is indexed to performance. Later incapacity or death prevents new exercises but does not unperform a valid earlier one. Authority Across Time governs the priority and scope of present and prior exercises; Performed Exercises and the Dead develops the narrower posthumous result. The exercise ground at Claim Grounds explains how performed exercises reshape later claims.
Authorization is one possible warrant, not the exhaustive account of permission. Showing that no authorization exists leaves open whether another justification is adequate and whether the act is justified. It also leaves open the holder's later claim to an account.
Counterfeit grants
Four recurring devices resemble authorization without containing a performed grant:
- Tacit consent: remaining counts as agreement even where exit was not live at reasonable cost.
- Hypothetical consent: a prediction that the holder would have agreed is treated as the agreement.
- Retroactive consent: later approval is made to authorize an earlier act rather than alter the relation from the time of approval.
- Manufactured consent: an arrangement invokes an endorsement it helped produce by shaping the holder's available standpoint or terms of judgment.
Participation, elections, flourishing, silence, and continued relationship can all be evidence relevant to other claims. None becomes authorization unless a capable and free holder actually performs the grant at issue.
A shopfront photograph
Case: A family bakery commissions photographs of its staff for a new shopfront sign and a website. At a Tuesday meeting the owner describes the plan and says that anyone who would rather not appear should tell him. M, nineteen and five weeks into the job, says nothing. D is asked directly, is told which images will be used and where, understands the proposal, and agrees in writing. The owner also includes a photograph of P, a baker who left the previous year and now works elsewhere in the same town, on the ground that P was proud of the shop and would have agreed if anyone had thought to ask.
Verdict: Only D's agreement is authorization. D exists, has the capacity to understand and perform the exercise, is on the stated facts neither coerced nor addressed through a standpoint the bakery built, and has granted permission for the uses described rather than for uses at large. M's silence is not a grant. No exercise was performed, so no question of validity arises, and the owner's reading supplies the agreement from her having stayed in the room rather than finding one she made. P's case is a prediction about what P would have done; whether the prediction is accurate bears on how readily the grant could be obtained, not on whether one exists, and P is still there to be asked.
Machinery: Valid performed exercises supplies the four validity conditions and, ahead of them, the requirement that the holder actually perform the grant at issue; that requirement, rather than any of the conditions, is what separates D from M and P. Counterfeit grants names the two devices in play — silence treated as agreement, and a prediction treated as the agreement it predicts.
Cost: The finding is that two grants are absent, and it establishes nothing beyond that. It does not establish that using M's or P's photograph is wrong or unjustified; whether the bakery has some other adequate warrant is a separate question. It does not establish that M was coerced, since the freedom condition constrains exercises that were performed and she performed none. D's grant settles only D's position.
Stewardship is not authorization by proxy
Where a child, ward, unconscious patient, or other holder cannot exercise, another party may sometimes act for the holder's good. The framework classifies this as stewardship, not as the holder's authorization. No consent is imputed and no exercise is performed in the holder's name.
Stewardship operates under claims already directed to the guardian, clinician, or holder of power. The Holder's Good supplies the evidence, beneficiary, and contest disciplines for describing what those claims require; Authority Across Time gives priority to the holder's own valid exercises when they are available. Stewardship can justify intervention without manufacturing a grant, and it can fail without violating a refusal that was never performed.
This correction matters at beginnings. No proxy authorizes a beginning for the one begun. The positive duties of initiators arise from the initiation ground, not from consent given on behalf of a nonexistent grantor.
Revocation and continuing performance
A valid exercise can create reliance and repair claims, but no exercise settles every later question in advance. Where carrying out an exercise requires the holder's continuing bodily performance, the exercise remains revocable as to specific performance while that condition continues. This result is derived at Claim Grounds given the bridge that compelled bodily continuation converts the holder into material; revocation's costs can sound in repair, never compulsion.
Limits
- The validity conditions are conceptual constraints on an exercise, not a complete theory of capacity or coercion.
- Authorization does not establish the adequacy of conduct toward third parties whose claims the grantor cannot waive.
- Capacity, coercion, and the point at which the holder's own exercise displaces stewardship remain incomplete; Open Questions records that boundary.