Glossary entry

Revisable Delegation

Glossary entry in Governance & power. Definitions, checks, and evidence for Revisable Delegation.

Quick takeaways

Delegation of consequential work to a machine that stays tied to the evidence and beliefs that justified it, so the grant can be narrowed, suspended, or withdrawn when those cha…

Definition

Delegation of consequential work to a machine that stays tied to the evidence and beliefs that justified it, so the grant can be narrowed, suspended, or withdrawn when those change. A revisable delegation names its holder, its ceiling, what it depends on, and what would revoke it; an unrevisable one is a transfer with a delegation's name. The objects it is written in are the authority grant, the policy record it depends on, and the delegated agency the grant creates.

Revisability is the standing property. Justified delegation is the same coupling read in the present tense: whether authority, evidence, and correction capacity are all in force right now. The two are one question at two timescales. A delegation that is justified today but not revisable cannot act on tomorrow's answer.

The question it serves is how an institution can become more capable without becoming less revisable. The record shape is defined in STD-07, and the terms the delegation must keep meeting while it stands are in STD-08. The test is whether the institution can answer, for any past action, what it believed at the time, what it had authorized, and what has since changed.

Adjacent terms

Related concepts

Also tagged: Agency

Also tagged: Structural

Example corpus

  • An agent's standing deploy permission is tied to a verified staging check; when the check breaks, the permission drops to confirm-mode automatically and the log shows which record forced it.

References

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Cite this glossary entry Formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX, RIS

Version

v1.4.0

Last updated

Sep 18, 2026

DOI

Pending Zenodo deposit

APA

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. (2026). Revisable Delegation. Ethotechnics glossary. https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/revisable-delegation

MLA

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. "Revisable Delegation." Ethotechnics glossary, 2026, https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/revisable-delegation.

Chicago

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. "Revisable Delegation." Ethotechnics glossary. Sep 18, 2026. https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/revisable-delegation.

BibTeX

@misc{glossary_revisable-delegation,
  title={Revisable Delegation},
  author={Ethotechnics Institute Research Team},
  year={2026},
  howpublished={Ethotechnics glossary},
  url={https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/revisable-delegation},
  version={v1.4.0}
}

RIS

TY  - WEB
TI  - Revisable Delegation
AU  - Ethotechnics Institute Research Team
PY  - 2026
UR  - https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/revisable-delegation
ER  -

Scholarly metadata

Authorship

Contact: research@ethotechnics.org

Publication details

  • Published: Dec 3, 2025
  • Last updated: Sep 18, 2026
  • Version: v1.4.0
  • DOI: Pending Zenodo deposit

License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Credit Ethotechnics Institute, include the term title + version, and link to the glossary permalink.

Archive: Wayback Machine history

Changelog

  • v1.7.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Non-Finality, Consequential Contradiction, and The Excluded Case, and generalized the falsified denominator into the falsified ledger — completing the five concerns and the fallibilist ground they stand on.
  • v1.6.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Human Non-Substitutability, Safe Incompleteness, Anti-Conversion Rights, Abstention, Constitutional Debt, Discretion Migration, and Corrigibility Rent — the person-side principles, the three abstentions, and the rent concept.
  • v1.5.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Exception Absorption, Exception Learning, Case Corrigibility, Structural Corrigibility, Institutional Learning, Corrective Debt, and the Workaround Presumption, formalizing the historical turn: reading institutions through their failure trajectories rather than their stated controls.
  • v1.4.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Residual Complexity, Complexity Displacement, Falsified Denominator, Closure Without Remainder, Constitutional Governance, and Post-Optimization Rigor, embedding the foundational contention of burden redistribution.
  • v1.3.0 · 2026-09-11 — Added Attestation, Liability Record, Carve-Out, Delegation Chain, Composed Latency, and Silent-Harm Discovery, each bound to the standard clause that requires it.
  • v1.2.0 · 2026-09-08 — Added The Non-Conversion Principle, Exit Cost, and Jurisdictional Path Dependence, each linked to the theory essay that argues for it.
  • v1.1.0 · 2026-01-09 — Expanded scholarly metadata, operational tests, and provenance notes.
  • v1.0.0 · 2025-12-03 — Initial glossary release with stable permalinks.