  Most who think of legitimate authority as a kind of moral power to change the moral situation of others think of it as creating duties in others.  And this is certainly the most prominent and striking exercise of authority.  But political authorities do not only create duties in others in and some cases do not purport to create such duties at all.  The most prominent instances of this can be found in international institutions.  The Security Council of the United Nations exercises authority in a variety of ways: sometimes acting as a kind of legislative body and sometimes acting as a kind of executive body.  Its executive authority is its traditional role in international law.  But this executive authority is quite distinct from the kind of executive authority we see in the state.  The Security Council exercises its executive authority primarily by authorizing actions and not by carrying them out by itself or by requiring them.  One way to describe the moral power of the Security Council is that it gives a liberty to states to prosecute wars.  It does this against a background of a general prohibition of all war except in the case of self-defense.  It suspends that prohibition for certain states.  It does not require them to act, it only permits them to act in a warlike way.  This is because the agent of enforcement in the international system is a decentralized one.