Lecture 2.7

The States of Authority

A decision structure does not only return 'authorised'. It returns one of a small set of states, and the discipline requires each to be explicit: deterministic authorisation, conditional authorisation, a referral to human authority, and an unresolved state where authority cannot be established. This lecture treats those states as first-class outputs and argues that a machine must never convert the absence of an answer into a fabricated one.

Supports Law 7 — The Boundary of Authority Must Be Enforced, Not Assumed. →

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Learning objectives

After this lesson, the reader should understand:

01Enumerate the outcome states an authority artifact can return and what each asserts.
02Distinguish a denial (authority says no) from an escalation (authority is undetermined).
03Design a rule so that 'human judgement required' is an authored outcome, not a fallback.

Concept framework

Four states

01Deterministic — conditions resolve; the artifact authorises or denies
02Conditional — authorised unless a further condition holds; otherwise escalate
03Discretionary — the artifact routes to a named human authority by design
04Unresolved — authority cannot be established; the action stops and returns to the institution

Case study

The missing 'no'

An artifact evaluates a hardship waiver. The facts needed for one condition are not in the record, and the rule has no branch for that. What should it return?

Not a denial, and certainly not a grant. A denial asserts the institution considered the case and refused it; the institution did no such thing. The correct output is an unresolved state — authority could not be established on the evidence available — which halts the automated path and hands the case back with the evaluated context attached. Institutions resist this because an escalated count looks like a system that does not work. It is the opposite: an artifact that always returns authorised or denied has been built to hide the cases it cannot actually decide. 'The machine is not authorised to decide this' is itself a statement of computable authority, and a valuable one. A reference runtime shows how the four states are carried in practice. Its literal verdicts are three — AUTHORIZED, DENIED, ESCALATED — and the conditional state is not a fourth verdict but a disclosure attached to the others: the transcript reports how many higher-priority rules were left unresolved for want of facts, so a caller can tell whether the verdict was sealed with every relevant condition actually decided. The unresolved state itself splits by cause. A rule with no branch for the facts present escalates and returns the case. A request whose issuer cannot be recognised at all fails before any rule is consulted, as a distinct error rather than a verdict — because re-presenting better evidence of authority can fix the second and never the first.

Discussion questions

Is an escalation a failure of the artifact, or a designed feature of it?
Should the four states be visible to the decision subject, or only to the institution?
What proportion of escalations is healthy, and what would too few tell you?
Who is accountable for a case that sits unresolved because no one owns the referral path?

Exercise

Assign an outcome state to every path in one rule.

01List every combination of conditions the rule can encounter, including missing facts.
02Assign each to one of the four states.
03For every discretionary path, name the human authority it routes to.
04For every unresolved path, state what context travels with the referral.
05Flag any path currently resolved by a silent default.

Research notes

Defeasible reasoning — conclusions that hold 'unless'.
Human-in-the-loop architecture — referral as a designed output.
Decision tables — completeness and the forbidden 'otherwise' gap.
Legal theory — non liquet and the limits of a decision procedure.
Computable Authority, §10 — 'Ambiguity and Discretion'.

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