Thanks for engaging with my piece and for these interesting thoughts—really appreciate it.
I agree that, on a personal level, turning ‘doing the most good’ into an instrumental goal towards the terminal goal of ‘being happy’ sounds like an intuitive and healthy way to approach decision-making. My concern however is that this is not EA, or at least not EA as embodied by its fundamental principles as explored in my piece.
The question that comes to my mind as I read your comment is: ‘is instrumental EA (A) a personal ad hoc exemption to EA (i.e. a form of weak EA), or (B) a proposed reformulation of EA’s principles?’
If the former, then I think this is subject to the same pressures as outlined in my piece. If the latter, then my concern would be that the fundamental objective of this reformulation is so divorced from EA’s original intention that the concept of EA becomes meaningless.
This is a really interesting parallel—thank you!
It ties neatly into one of my major concerns with my piece -whether it can be interpreted as anti-rationality / a critique of empiricism (which is not the intention).
My reflexive reaction to the claim that “enlightenment is totalitarian” is fairly heavy scepticism (whereas, obviously, I lean in the opposite direction as regards to EA), so I’m curious what distinctions there are between the arguments made in Dialectic and the arguments made in my piece. I will have a read of Dialectic and think through this further.