Authority at Scale: Institutional Capacity and the Limits of Presumptive Authority

An institution's directives may in fact serve its recipients' reasons, as Raz's Normal Justification Thesis requires, while the institution lacks standing to insist that recipients forgo their own checks. This article separates objective authority from that entitlement. For continuing, consequential, and contestable directives, the entitlement depends on two substantiated presuppositions of the demand: that deference is worthwhile for the recipient's reference class, with a route for individual rebuttal, and that the exposure to error it creates is correctable at the scale of issuance. Given a justified directive role and a decision not reserved to the recipient's own judgment, the two are jointly sufficient. Serviceability is operationalized by a Scale-Indexed Serviceability test applied to a specified mechanism, lawful architecture, horizon, issuance scale, and claim mix. Failure to substantiate withholds the entitlement; a certified absence of any feasible plan defeats it and requires affected adverse issuance, or its effect, to be restricted to what can be serviced. Neither status invalidates lawful acts. Two consequences follow: a Wide-Scope Duty of Sustainable Issuance binds the bodies controlling scale and capacity, and Deontic Debt preserves directed claims when due obligations are deficiently serviced, even where incapacity is excused. A stipulated benefits administration shows each status at work. Contents of this record Authority_at_Scale.pdf: the article (approx. 10,000 words, 21 pages). halden_schedule_check.py: reference implementation of the running case (Section 6.7). It reproduces the baseline waiting times and checks the defeat, withholding, and recovery scenarios. Python 3 standard library only; run with python3 halden_schedule_check.py. Related work. The article generalizes the four service conditions developed for machine-mediated authority in Cott, N. (2026), The Empty Occupant: Answerability, Testimony, and the Limits of Machine-Mediated Authority, Zenodo, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23272655.