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TimS comments on The curse of identity - Less Wrong
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We seem to be having a definitional problem. Perhaps if you taboo the word gratitude, then we might understand your position better.
Ok. I would replace "Being grateful for an action" by "recognizing that an action is important/beneficial". Pursuing a pure gratitude-free goal would mean: pursuing a goal that nobody think is beneficial or important to do (except you, because you do it), and supposedly nobody ever will. My claim is that such action is absurd from an ethical (universalist) perspective.
I don't understand what you mean by "absurd."
Bob tells you that he is going to climb a boring and uninteresting mountain because he randomly feels like it. There's nothing to see there that couldn't be seen elsewhere, and everyone else thinks that climbing that mountain is pointless. Omega verifies that Bob has no other motivation for climbing the mountain.
Would you say that Bob's desire to climb the mountain is (a) mentally defective (i.e. insane), (b) immoral, (c) impossible, (d) not relevant to your point, or (e) something else?
What do you mean by "randomly feels like it"? Maybe he wants some fresh air or something... Then it's a personal motivation, and my answer is (d) not relevant to ethic. The discussion in this article was not, I think, about casual goals like climbing a mountain, but about the goals in your life, the important things to do (maybe I should use the term "finalities" instead). It was a matter of ethic.
If Bob believes that climbing this mountain is good or important while he admits that his only motivation is "randomly feeling like it", then I call his belief absurd.