Item 77: What licenses authorized disposition?

The answerability calculus lets incurred content leave the account by one of two routes: satisfaction, and authorized disposition — content that legitimately ceases to be owed without being answered. Satisfaction has an authentication obligation. Disposition has a licence predicate, MayDispose, and no theory of what licenses it.

This is the highest-value unfiled question in the line, because it is three questions at once.

It is where defeat lives. "Reason r' defeats reason r" is, in this vocabulary, exactly a licence to stop owing r's remaining content. So the open Layer II question when may one reason replace another is this question.

It is the laundering channel. An unaudited disposition term makes every insolvency and every unanswered burden disappear; the no-laundering theorem is true only because it assumes each disposition term is authenticated.

It changes the affordability question. The persistence analysis rests on the obligation stream diverging. If content can be legitimately disposed of, what has to diverge is undisposed content, and a reason that looks permanently insolvent may be affordable after authorized disposition.

Settle it. Give a licence predicate with an authentication obligation and a soundness theorem — disposed content is content that could not have been owed, or was answered under a different description, or was superseded by an authorized revision whose grounds trace back to the initial rule set — and then say what it does to the obligation stream the affordability theory consumes.

A prior-art check is part of the deliverable. Horty's priority orderings among defaults are the obvious place to look and are probably not enough: a priority ordering says which reason wins, not what licenses the loser to stop being owed. Whether that machinery can express MayDispose at all is worth settling before building something new.

Deliverable shape: a stated theorem with exact-rational fixtures, including a legitimate disposition and a laundering attempt the licence rejects. Acceptance check: the round's runner is discovered by python3 tests/run.py and passes.

Context: projects/normativity/legitimacy/checkpoint-2026-09-01/ANSWERABILITY_AND_SERVICE.md §6 for why the three questions are one, and that checkpoint's OPEN_PROBLEMS.md §2; projects/normativity/legitimacy/rounds/2026-08-30-anchored-slices-auth-transfer/ for the conservation law the disposition term sits in, and projects/normativity/legitimacy/rounds/2026-08-31-faithful-semantic-preservation/ for the authentication side. A solution ships: the licence, its soundness theorem, and a statement of what the affordability theory's obligation stream becomes once disposition is available.

Partly answered, 2026-09-02, by projects/normativity/legitimacy/rounds/2026-09-02-unified-grounds-answerable-defeat/, conditional on the Defeat Principle (DECISIONS.md, queued in Awaiting the author). Shipped: the licence — answerable disposal, grounded and routed and separated — with a soundness theorem, a no-self-grounding theorem, and a laundering theorem; the disposition term's effect on the obligation stream, which is that disposal is an obligation-to-obligation transport step contributing zero to either terminal fate, so what must diverge is undisposed content and the F3 bound gains one term D·κ^r_N; and the type a disposal's grounds live in, which no previous type supplied. Not shipped, and the item stays open for them: the Horty prior-art check this item asks for was not performed; and the licence does not stop coalitions — two participants alternating disposals satisfy separation at every edge and launder indefinitely, so the laundering channel this item names is narrowed and not closed.

Prior-art check partly done, 2026-09-03, by projects/normativity/legitimacy/rounds/2026-09-03-defeat-landing-horty-standing/HORTY.md. **Verdict: Horty's machinery cannot express MayDispose** — and the reason is deeper than this item states. A priority ordering does not merely fail to license the loser's release; Horty's theory says what to conclude rather than what is owed, so there is no account for a licence to operate on and the question does not arise inside it. Of the round's three clauses, grounds have an image and successor and separation do not — the last because a default theory has no participants, not because the ordering is exogenous, which in variable-priority default logic it is not. Exclusion is challengeable in-system (undercutting is a triggered default lowering a weight, and the undercutter is itself defeasible), so an exclusionary reason is closer to dispose than to settle and the two summands do not collapse. ASPIC+ has no successor, and its attack relation is unauthored.

Checked against primary text. The verdict above is verified against **Horty, Reasons as Defaults, Draft #2, 16 August 2006** — the paper the 2012 book develops, carrying the whole apparatus: Definitions 1–7, fixed- and variable-priority theories, and the threshold theories that become "exclusionary default logic". Horty states the crux himself: exclusionary reasons "can themselves be excluded", and he rejects a stratified hierarchy of reason-orders.

What still blocks the item. Two things, and neither is the theory question. First, the OUP 2012 book was not read — its contribution over the paper is that development plus the Dancy material, so a citation of the book is not yet licensed. Second, and larger, the laundering channel this item names is closed against single participants and not against coalitions: two participants alternating disposals satisfy separation at every edge. The item closes when a maintainer either obtains the book or rules the paper sufficient, and when the coalition hole is closed.