Love After Care: Dignity, Substitution, and the Ethics of Institutional Recognition

This working paper and extended article outline develops a theoretical framework for understanding how institutions recognize, misrecognize, and sometimes degrade persons through forms, files, categories, scores, records, metrics, workflows, and authorized pathways. It argues that care is necessary but exhaustible, while dignity remains binding when care is strained, unavailable, costly, or institutionally blocked. The paper names substitution as a central institutional wrong: the event in which an institutional description, category, diagnosis, score, file, or record comes to stand in for the person it was meant to make visible. It distinguishes substitution from reduction, specifies a degradation threshold with five diagnostic criteria, and develops visibility without degradation as the corresponding ethical standard for recognition infrastructure. The framework draws on care ethics, dignity theory, recognition theory, classification studies, legibility, quantification, administrative burden, business and human-rights theory, and institutional ethics. It applies across health care, long-term care, education, carceral systems, social services, employment, and other institutional domains. This version is deposited as a citable working-paper outline rather than a peer-reviewed article. Section-level headings such as “Section Claim” and “Transition” are retained intentionally to show the argumentative structure of the developing article. The core concepts established in this version include substitution, recognition infrastructure, the degradation threshold, and visibility without degradation.