Musings on authority

I have a lot of authority to impose hardships on myself. I can impose hardships on myself in two main ways. I can do something that either is or causes a hardship or risk of hardship to myself. Or I can commit myself to doing something that is or causes me a hardship or risk of hardship (I can commit myself by making a promise or by otherwise putting myself in a position where there is no morally permissible way to avoid the hardship). I have a wide moral latitude to decide which burdens to bear for the sake of which goods, though not an unlimited latitude. The decisions between goods are morally limited by the virtue of prudence. It would be wrong to undertake a 90% risk of death for the sake of a muffin. But it's morally up to me, or at least would be if I had no dependents, whether to undertake a 40% risk of death for the sake of writing a masterpiece. I do have the authority to impose some hardships on my children and my students, but that authority is much more limited: I do not have the authority to impose a 40% risk of death for the sake of writing a masterpiece. My authority to impose hardships on myself is much greater than my authority to impose hardships on others.

One explanation of the difference in the degree of our authority over ourselves and our authority over others is that people's authority over others derives from people's authority over themselves: we give authority over us to others. That is what the contractarian thinks, but it is implausible for familiar reasons (e.g., there aren't enough voluntarily accepted contracts to make contractarianism work). I prefer one of these two stories:

1. Both authority (of the hardship-imposing kind) over self and authority over others derives from God's authority over us.
2. Of necessity, some relationships are authority-conferring, and different kinds of relationships are necessarily authority-conferring to different degrees. For instance, identity in a mature person confers great authority of x with respect to x. Parenthood by a mature person of an immature person confers much authority but less than identity of a mature person does.

What about God's authority? On view (1), we would expect God to have more authority to impose hardships than anybody else has, including more authority to impose hardships on us than we have with respect to our own selves. What about on view (2)? That's less clear. We would intuitively expect that the God-creature relationship be more authority-conferring than the parent-child one. But how does it compare to identity? It would be religiously uncomfortable to say that someone has more authority over me than God does, even if I am that someone. Can we give a philosophical explanation for this religious intuition? Maybe, but I'm not yet up to it. I think a part of the story is that all our goods are goods by participation in God, that our telos is a telos-by-participation in God as the ultimate final cause of all.

Suppose we could argue that God has more hardship-imposing authority over ourselves than we have over ourselves. Then I think we would have a powerful tool for theodicy. A crucial question in theodicy is whether it is permissible for God to allow hardship H to me for the sake of good G (for myself or another). We would then have a defeasible sufficient condition for this permissibility: if it would not be immorally imprudent for me to allow H to myself for the sake of G, then it would be permissible for God to allow H to me for the sake of G. This is a much stronger criterion than one that is occasionally used in the literature, namely that if I would rationally allow H to myself for the sake of G, then God can permissibly allow it, too.