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quen_tin comments on The curse of identity - Less Wrong
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Let me rephrase.
The assumption that there would exist pure gratitude-free goals is a myth: pursuing such goals would be absurd. (people who seem do perform gratitude-free actions are often religious people: they actually believe in divine gratitude).
Therefore social gratitude is an essential component of any goal and thus it is not correlated with lack of sincere motivation, nor does it "downgrade" the goal to something less important. It's just part of it.
I'm afraid you are making a very strong statement with hardly any evidence to support it. You merely claim that people who pursue gratitude-free goals are often religious people (source?) and that such goals are a myth and absurd. (Why?) I for one, don't understand why such a goal would be necessarily absurd..
Also, I can imagine that even if I was the only person in the world, I would still pursue some goals.
It's absurd from an ethical point of view, as a finality. I was implicitely talking in the context of pursuing "important goals", that is, valued on an ethical basis. Abnegation at some level is an important part of most religious doctrines.
What prediction about the world can you make from these beliefs? What would be less - or more - surprising to you than to those with typical beliefs here?
Ethic is not about predicting perceptions but conducting actions.
Let me justify my position.
Gratitude-free actions are absurd from an ethical point of view, because we do not have access to any transcendant and absolute notion of "good". Consequently, we have no way to tell if an action is good if noone is grateful for it.
If you perform a gratitude-free action, either it's only good for you: then you're selfish, and that's far from the universal aim of ethics. Either you you believe in a transcendant notion of "good", together with a divine gratitude, which is a religious position.
Is the following a reasonable paraphrase of your position:
My view is very altruistic on the contrary : seeking gratitude is seeking to perform actions that benefits others or the whole society. Game theoretic considerations would justify being selfish, which does not deserve gratitude at all.