Pluralist Sufficiency and the Problem of Institutional Recognition

Pluralist accounts of sufficiency make a compelling move: if human lives, capacities, and dependencies vary too much for one uniform threshold to do the required moral work, then sufficiency must be organized around what particular persons can and cannot tolerate. The move is ethically attractive. But it creates an institutional problem that has gone unaddressed. If sufficiency thresholds are person-sensitive, institutions must be able to recognize when a particular person, in a particular context, has fallen below what is sufficient or tolerable for them — and that recognition is not guaranteed. This Comment argues that legibility names that recognition condition. Drawing on work on institutional legibility, classification, and recognition, I argue that unmet need becomes institutionally actionable only when it can be rendered visible, credible, documentable, and responsive within institutional systems. This Comment also distinguishes ethical legibility from surveillance: the relevant aim is not maximum visibility but visibility without degradation. The normative and institutional questions are not separable: a complete theory of enough must explain how not-enough comes to matter within the systems responsible for response.