I get your point. So the premise is that employee's personal desires and company's objectives don't usually tend to align themselves naturally, right? If there were no goals in place, would that be bad? How bad?
Knowing yourself and what you want is very important. If your job just poofed out of existence today, but you still made the same salary - what would you want to do with your time?
Once you have that firmly entrenched in your head, then you can begin the negotiation with your manager and your company on how to align your personal wants with the company's wants.
I think it's bad when you-and-company don't have that alignment, because it means one (or both) of you hasn't truly thought about what you want and aren't communicating your desires well.
The endgame in all of this is an agreed-upon social contract between you, your manager, and your employer. You agree to provide a certain amount of work in exchange for compensation, which might include money, learning opportunities, pleasant coworkers, an easy commute, etc. Proper goal-setting, at its best, should be just ironing out line items in that contract.
Basically I'm curious about this: we're all applying this framework, taking it for granted. It was there, we accepted it. But I wonder: what if it wasn't there?
I'm building a machine, I know the minimum requirements to make it work. I build it like that and then I think: should I also add to it this other cog as well? Would it improve _somehow_ the machine? Well, the other folks are doing it, heck, I'll do it as well!
Now you have a heavier, more complex, machine, with one more cog, and you don't even know if you really need it.
Sorry for the brutally simple example, but I'm still missing an evidence we really need these frameworks.
then you have to conclude: On a long enough time horizon, the humans must change their own abilities to match the changing requirements of the product, or the company will go bankrupt.
Now, given that conclusion: you are correct, goal-setting is not required. And we have evidence that it is not required in companies that mostly outsource technical labor on an as-needed basis rather than set goals to continually realign employees with company objectives.
In some way, you have to choose an approach for calibrating changing employees and changing company objectives. Goal-setting is a low friction approach for calibration when the company prefers employees with internal domain knowledge over time. There are plenty of other approaches for aligning needs and available labor as well, but they are generally not preferred by both companies and individuals which is why you see the prevalence of this approach.
I worked for a big dotcom company in the past and
1) there was a cap on headcount (as it's usually the case), so a lot gets outsourced
2) they don't care about internal domain knowledge: everybody should be replaceable at any time, ramp up costs are not even taken into account. Companies that wants employees to set goals usually are big and usually can afford to lose people with "internal domain knowledge". Even if, of course, they'll try not to do that, but it's still not that big of a deal.
While I really like philosophy (really, I do!), I'm a very practical guy and I'm still missing the evidence that I'm looking for. And I'm pretty sure it won't come in the form of a syllogism :)