Hmm. It occurs to me that this disagreement might be because my original description of the issue mentioned several different scenarios, which I did not clearly differentiate between.

Scenario one: a person who wants to do prestigious jobs for a charity. Depending on the person, it could be that this is genuinely his preference, which won't change even if consciously realizes that this is his preference. In that scenario, then yes, it's just a preference and there's no problem as such. (Heck, I know I could never get any major project done if there wasn't some status pull involved in the project, somehow.) On the other hand, the person might want to change his behavior if he realized how and why he was acting.

Scenario two: a person wants to e.g. graduate from school, but he's having a hard time studying effectively because he isn't fully motivated on a subconscious level. This would correspond to what Caplan defines as a constraint:

If a person had 24 hours of time to divide between walking and resting, and a healthy person faced budget constraint A, then after contracting the flu or cancer, the same person would face a budget constraint such as B. A sufficiently sick person might collapse if he tried to walk for more than a few miles – suffering from reduced endurance as well as reduced speed. Then the budget constraint of the sick person would differ more starkly from the healthy person's, as shown by the kinked constraint in Figure 2.

This person tries to get studying done, and devotes a lot of time and energy to it. But because his subconscious gaols aren't fully aligned with his conscious goals, he needs to allocate far more time and energy to studying than the person whose subconscious goals are fully aligned with his conscious goals.