Well sure, feeling good is not the end goal and shouldn't become the end goal. That doesn't mean it should be dismissed or avoided.
Tasting good is not the end goal of food, nutrition is. I think the pushback might make more sense thinking about it that way. Suppose the OP had written a post talking about how healthy kale was:
> "It's super healthy, and if you cook it right, it tastes amazing too!"
> "That's disillusioning yourself just like every form of cooking does. The point of healthy eating is not to satisfy your taste buds."
Lots of things in the world can become a trap, but that doesn't mean they should always be avoided. I think sometimes people forget that empathy and morality are work. It takes reinforcement. Being "good" is something you learn and practice, it's not a binary switch you turn on and off.
So in other words, if I'm Cookie Monster, and I'm on the fence about donating blood, and somebody tells me that the Red Cross always supplies free cookies afterwards (and even apple juice sometimes, heck yeah) and that's just enough to push me over the fence to donate blood - good. I'm glad someone told me that then. I'm going to take advantage of any instinct that makes me more likely to help someone.
And, yeah, maybe it'll become a problem sometime and I'll not want to help out with an event that doesn't have free cookies. Then I'll switch to a variable reward schedule to help ingrain the habit, or I'll start weaning myself off of cookies, or whatever. But the point is to start somewhere.
If I start doing sit-ups, I'm absolutely going to have someone hold my feet because my core strength isn't going to be there at the beginning. Empathy is a muscle; treat it like one.
Another way of looking at it is that the people you are helping usually don't care about your internal morality. So by all means, focus on your internal morality - but only if it doesn't get in the way of you helping them. During a blood shortage, you get no moral points for saying "well, I didn't donate blood because I didn't think I could do it in a truly selfless way."
Tasting good is not the end goal of food, nutrition is. I think the pushback might make more sense thinking about it that way. Suppose the OP had written a post talking about how healthy kale was:
> "It's super healthy, and if you cook it right, it tastes amazing too!"
> "That's disillusioning yourself just like every form of cooking does. The point of healthy eating is not to satisfy your taste buds."
Lots of things in the world can become a trap, but that doesn't mean they should always be avoided. I think sometimes people forget that empathy and morality are work. It takes reinforcement. Being "good" is something you learn and practice, it's not a binary switch you turn on and off.
So in other words, if I'm Cookie Monster, and I'm on the fence about donating blood, and somebody tells me that the Red Cross always supplies free cookies afterwards (and even apple juice sometimes, heck yeah) and that's just enough to push me over the fence to donate blood - good. I'm glad someone told me that then. I'm going to take advantage of any instinct that makes me more likely to help someone.
And, yeah, maybe it'll become a problem sometime and I'll not want to help out with an event that doesn't have free cookies. Then I'll switch to a variable reward schedule to help ingrain the habit, or I'll start weaning myself off of cookies, or whatever. But the point is to start somewhere.
If I start doing sit-ups, I'm absolutely going to have someone hold my feet because my core strength isn't going to be there at the beginning. Empathy is a muscle; treat it like one.
Another way of looking at it is that the people you are helping usually don't care about your internal morality. So by all means, focus on your internal morality - but only if it doesn't get in the way of you helping them. During a blood shortage, you get no moral points for saying "well, I didn't donate blood because I didn't think I could do it in a truly selfless way."