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So in other words... exactly what Hamilton and Price, and by exstension both I and the field of biology, defined as altruism? I mean if you want to insist that altruism is the wrong word for this quality than go ahead, but it doesn't make the rest of what I said any less valid.

My entire point is that this is a ridiculous standard to hold when deciding what values a culture "believes" in. Shockingly, cultures change, and the principles on which they were originally founded are not necessarily the principles that they most strongly believe in now. By this logic you...

Yes but you see, while there have been successful societies that believe in Christianity, by your own metric that’s not the same thing as “Christian societies”. If you can just arbitrarily assert that societies which proudly and openly believe in contractarianism—such as America in the time of...

There absolutely is something wrong with the sociopath's reasoning in principle--it's irrational in the sense that it does not allow an agent to achieve best possible satisfaction of their premises. One says that a person is "wrong" to be immoral in the same sense that a vacuum is "wrong" to not...

A sociopath certainly would do that, and that sociopath would be wrong. That, once again, is the entire point of Morals by Agreement and more broadly the entire contractarian contract. The moral constraints presented by the contractarian theory are simply those conditions which are necessary for...

...no? The whole project of contractarianism is designed around grounding morality in such a way that even a sociopath--a purely asocial, non-tuistic actor--could acknowledge it, purely on the basis of their strategic reason in the pursuit of their own self-interest. Gauthier directly...

This may come as a surprise to you, but the Liberal tradition is not in fact made up of gibbering imbeciles who have spent the last two centuries ignoring the single most obvious, common, and puerile objection to their philosophical foundation that exists. Have you ever read Gauthier?