This whole line of discussion about happiness is a red herring, as far as I can tell. It started from one of your quibbles.

Again, I'm not saying economists need to practice philosophy to make their economic models or arguments work. I'm saying they insinuate that capitalism is best because it's self-regulating, which means they broach the value question in positing or implying that capitalism is good. Once that's done, the mask's off, and the concept of utility is easily translated into the ordinary, normative concept of happiness. So I'm talking about implications and insinuations here, and about the social impact of orthodox economics, not so much about explicit arguments.

By contrast, you're a stickler for the letter of the law. You say economists don't explicitly say any such thing, since saying that would be unscientific. But what's at issue here is the legitimacy of that scientific status. If the value-neutrality is only a veneer, we're obliged not to take economic models at face value but to look at the bigger picture, to see the spirit rather than just the letter of the law, as it were.