Abstract

This paper asks what any moral system must be able to do in order to count as coherent. It treats moral systems, from a non-realist default, as human normative architectures for organizing values, vulnerabilities, emotions, expectations, actions, blame, permission, repair, and institutional life rather than as transparent maps of stance-independent moral facts. The paper argues that a candidate moral system must satisfy thirteen structural conditions: domain specification, object specification, value-basis articulation, semantic determinacy, status grammar, norm-generation, justificatory articulation, consistency, priority, empirical discipline, finite-agent action-guidance, selector exposure, and contestable revision. These conditions are necessary because failure at any point produces not merely a bad moral theory but a structurally defective one, and jointly sufficient because remaining objections concern truth, warrant, legitimacy, or desirability rather than coherence itself. The paper develops the framework through formal definitions, a worked case, stress tests of major moral theories, and diagnostic tables. Its central claim is that moral coherence is moral solvency: a moral system must be able to pay its debts of domain, object, value, meaning, status, inference, justification, consistency, conflict, fact, action, genealogy, and revision.