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i’m thinking about this terms of an excess (surfeit?) of instrumentality, and pairing this with “pragmatism is true but it doesn’t work”. like let’s play along for a moment and say that the future presents itself as a telos and we’re acting with nested activities towards that.
sometimes surely that means that acknowledging your telos (in a particular domain?) can be counterproductive. which there isnt really anything mysterious about, it just runs against the grain of most knowledge fetishized approaches.
also i think virtue ethics can avoid the charge of instrumentality (as implied by my use of excess), although i do think we’re somewhat treading into verbal immunization strategies, although not nearly as egregious as the attempt to compatibalize it with consequentialism
it’s just a problem that doesn’t really arise in other worldviews (which counts in favor of VE fwiw). you’re not gonna act immorally by respecting the categorical imperative or maximizing utility too much. like you can spin it but they’re relatively marginal concerns
whereas here i think in maybe even most instances verbalizing an account of what you’re doing and why would be destructive to the practice itself
and weirdly also has a distorting effect, by focusing too much on the nested nature of one’s projects you’re missing out on the other side of virtue ethics that places specific emphasis on practices being goods in themselves