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Moral Competence Before Moral Content: Why LLM Agents Lack the Prerequisites for Coherent Alignment

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 4, 2026 · UTC

AI alignment requires AI systems to adhere to human norms, values, or intentions. Under value pluralism there is no correct target, but a shared prerequisite is that the system's behavior expresses a coherent policy: a mapping from situations to verdicts that is invariant while a situation's morally relevant features are preserved, and sensitive when they change. We introduce four structural conditions for such coherent policies: verdict stability, monotonicity, decisiveness, and Pareto viability. Together they measure a form of moral competence that is evaluable from behavior alone, without r

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