I don’t know for sure whether we’re really disagreeing. Perhaps that’s a question with no definite answer; the question’s about where best to draw the boundary of an only-vaguely-defined term. But it seems like you’re saying “goal-thinking must only be concerned with goals that don’t involve people’s happiness” and I’m saying I think that’s a mistake and that the fundamental distinction is between doing something as part of a happiness-maximizing process and recognizing the layer of indirection in that and aiming at goals we can see other reasons for, which may or may not happen to involve our or someone else’s happiness.
Obviously you can choose to focus only on goals that don’t involve happiness in any way at all, and maybe doing so makes some of the issues clearer. But I don’t think “involving happiness” / “not involving happiness” is the most fundamental criterion here; the distinction is actually, as your original terminology makes clear, between different modes of thinking.
I don’t know for sure whether we’re really disagreeing. Perhaps that’s a question with no definite answer; the question’s about where best to draw the boundary of an only-vaguely-defined term. But it seems like you’re saying “goal-thinking must only be concerned with goals that don’t involve people’s happiness” and I’m saying I think that’s a mistake and that the fundamental distinction is between doing something as part of a happiness-maximizing process and recognizing the layer of indirection in that and aiming at goals we can see other reasons for, which may or may not happen to involve our or someone else’s happiness.
Obviously you can choose to focus only on goals that don’t involve happiness in any way at all, and maybe doing so makes some of the issues clearer. But I don’t think “involving happiness” / “not involving happiness” is the most fundamental criterion here; the distinction is actually, as your original terminology makes clear, between different modes of thinking.