I think it would be better not to use the word “wholesome”. Using it is cheating, by letting us pretend at the same time that (A) we’re explaining a new kind of ethics, which we name “wholesome”, and (B) that we already know what “wholesome” means. This is a common and severe epistemological failure mode which traces back to the writings of Plato.
If you replace every instance of “wholesome” with the word “frobby”, does the essay clearly define “frobby”?
It seems to me to be a way to try to smuggle virtue ethics into the consequentialist rationality community by disguising it with a different word. If you replace every instance of “wholesome” with the word “virtuous”, does the essay’s meaning change?
Isn’t LessWrong a disproof of this? Aren’t we thousands of people? If you picked two active LWers at random, do you think the average overlap in their reading material would be 5 words? More like 100,000, I’d think.