Financial governance is typically evaluated in terms of efficiency, compliance and risk — criteria that leave important normative questions about legitimacy, fairness and accountability largely unaddressed. This paper develops the Critical Social Contract for Finance (CSCF), a structured framework for the moral evaluation of financial actions, rules and institutions. The framework treats financial markets as open systems shaped by structures that preexist individual choices and distribute risks, burdens and welfare across parties who often have limited voice in the decisions that affect them — an account with direct implications for how financial governance should be assessed. Drawing on established ethical traditions and social contract theory, CSCF offers ten sequenced criteria — gates — covering legitimacy, consent, reciprocity, responsibility, transparency, proportionality, justice, sustainability, solidarity and reflexivity. The framework is applied to the 2012 Greek sovereign debt restructuring, the largest sovereign debt write-off in history, to demonstrate its analytical reach and to identify specific moral deficits that conventional economic and legal analysis does not capture. The paper argues that normative assessment of this kind usefully complements economic evaluation of financial governance, offering a basis for comparing the moral adequacy of alternative institutional designs.

JEL Classification: G00, Β55, H63