Even if you wouldn't feel miserable by being poor because you magically eliminated negative incentives you would still feel less of the positive incentives when you are poor than when you were rich, even though richness is just the means to feeling better.
Negative and positive feelings are differently wired in the brain. Fewer positive feelings is not the same as more negative ones. Getting rid of negative feelings is very worthwhile even without increasing positive ones.
But the same logic justifies both, even if they are drastically different in other sort of ways.
Forcing yourself to feel maximum happiness would make sense if forcing yourself to feel minimum unhappiness made sense. They both interact with utilitarianism and preference systems which are the only relevant parts of the logic. The degree or direction of the experience doesn't matter here.
Removing negative incentives justifies maxing out positive incentives = nihilism.
I mean, you can arbitrarily only apply it to certain incentives which is desirable because th...
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