AIM Framework glossary
Appetitive Floors (A-floors)
Canonical definition
Appetitive Floors (A-floors) are institutionally guaranteed baselines of access to food, shelter, healthcare, and basic security, supplied unconditionally on Status and on Mimetic performance, that prevent chronic A-deficits from hijacking choice or being used as leverage. Appetitive Floors are a state of affairs rather than an instrument or a condition: they are in place or they are not. The defining property is the unconditionality and not the quantity, because provision made contingent on comparative standing returns the goods it supplies to the M-competitive domain and so does not discharge the A-Floor Requirement however large the provision is.
Explanation
When Appetitive Floors are in place, no one has to accept abuse, exploitation, or extreme risk just to avoid hunger, homelessness, or untreated pain. This stabilises the motivational system so that Intrinsic Motivation can actually surface and lead, instead of every decision being dominated by survival pressure. Their adequacy is not a fixed quantity, because the cost of reaching the A-Floor is itself moving: under unmanaged M-escalation the Mimetic Premium infiltrates A-necessary goods and raises the minimum cost of A-sufficiency faster than productivity, which is the A-Floor Erosion Principle. Appetitive Floors calibrated once and left are therefore Appetitive Floors whose real coverage falls, which yields a diagnostic the surrounding vocabulary could not otherwise express: where Appetitive Floors are in place and the A-Floor Requirement is nonetheless breached, the fault lies on the cost side and the finding is the A-Floor Erosion Principle rather than a failure of provision. Why the A-Floor Requirement is architectural rather than humanitarian. Appetitive Floors are not only a humanitarian provision. They are a precondition of the intervention architecture operating at all. The Bootstrapping Principle establishes that I-Override requires A-sufficiency: an Individual experiencing acute hunger, homelessness or untreated medical emergency cannot sustain the deliberative attention that structural analysis requires, because attention is correctly committed to immediate survival. That is architectural reality and not moral failing, and it is also why the scapegoat narrative succeeds under Appetitive deficit: the narrative is cognitively cheap where systemic analysis is cognitively expensive, and expense is unaffordable under urgency. Appetitive Floors are therefore the first phase of the Bootstrapping Sequence, in which emergency provision enables urgency reduction, urgency reduction enables diagnostic application, diagnostic application enables systemic analysis, and systemic analysis enables a reform coalition. Each phase creates the conditions for the next, so a programme that skips provision finds its systemic explanations rejected in favour of cognitively affordable scapegoat narratives.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.
Derivation
Chapter 5, Section 5.6.2; Chapter 12, Section 12.35; Chapter 15, Section 15.10.2; Chapter 18, Appendix 18B.8.
Also in the entry
Distinction from the A-Floor. Appetitive Floors are not the plural of the A-Floor, and the resemblance between the declared short form A-floors and the A-Floor is a trap worth naming. The A-Floor is a level, one per Individual, against which provision is compared. Appetitive Floors are the provision. A sentence about whether provision is adequate concerns the A-Floor; a sentence about what is supplied concerns Appetitive Floors. Distinction from the A-Floor Guarantee. Appetitive Floors are the baselines; an A-Floor Guarantee is the policy instrument that establishes and maintains them. A jurisdiction can have Appetitive Floors in place with no A-Floor Guarantee, where provision is abundant or informally secured, and can enact an A-Floor Guarantee whose Appetitive Floors are nonetheless failing where the A-Floor Erosion Principle has outrun it. The difference is one of register as much as of reference: Appetitive Floors is the term the architectural argument uses, the A-Floor Guarantee the term policy design uses.