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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.
See Fake Selfishness.
Seeking gratitude has nothing to do with selfishness., on the contrary. Something usually deserve gratitude if it benefits others. My position is very altruistic.
The error in reasoning is analogous.
I don't think so. Let me precise that my thoughts are to be understood from an ethical perspective: by "goal" I mean something that deserves to be done, in other words, "something good". I start from the assumption that having a goal supposes thinking that it's somehow something good (=something I should do), which is kind of tautologic.
Now I am only suggesting that a goal that does not deserve any gratitude can't be "good" from an ethical point of view.
Moreover, I am not proclaming I am purely seeking gratitude in all my actions.
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.
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.
That doesn't follow. Degree of sincerity and degree of social gratitute may well be correlated. The fact that motivations are seldom pure doesn't change that. It just makes the relationship more grey.
I don't make a difference between seeking social gratitude and having a goal. In my view, sincere motivation is positively correlated with seeking social gratitude. You can make an analogy with markets if you want: social gratitude is money, motivation is work. If something is worth doing, it will deserve social gratitude. In my view, the author here appears to be complaining that we are working for money and not for free...