Ah, thank you, that is helpful.

In the case of 'circular altruism', I confess I'm quite at a loss. I've never really managed to pull an argument out of there. But if we're just talking about the practice of quantifying goods in moral judgements, then I agree with you there's no strongly complete ethical calculus that's going to do render ethics a mathematical science. But in at least in 'circular reasoning' EY doesn't need quite so strong a view: so far as I can tell, he's just saying that our moral passions conflict with our reflective moral judgements. And even if we don't have a strongly complete moral system, we can make logically coherent reflective moral judgements. I'd go so far as to say we can make logically coherent reflective literary criticism judgements. Logic isn't picky.

So while, on the one hand, I'm also (as yet) unconvinced about EY's ethics, I think it goes too far in the opposite direction to say that ethical reasoning is inherently fuzzy or illogical. Valid arguments are valid arguments, regardless.