Emotions are intrinsically good and bad

[bennyboy]

I think there's conflation posing as reasoning here: we use the word "good" to talk about feelings we like, and then say that feelings are intrinsically good.  Sure you could say that, since the experience of feelings is intrinsic to the human condition.  But a five year-old has already arrived at this understanding: "I feel happy when I eat a carrot, but my sister cries when my mother makes her eat carrots.  We like different things."

What's the position, and where's the value in holding it?  What am I missing here?

It's irrelevant when people disagree on the matter. Because 'objective' does not mean 'universal'.

Objectivity precisely means that disagreement is irrelevant because there are objectively right and wrong answers regardless of agreement or disagreement on the matter.

And the fact that definitions themselves cannot be proven to be objectively the right definitions is irrelevant too. Defintions are the premises. Scientists don't have to prove that they are using the 'right definitions' before it becomes objective. The words are picked out subjectively and they're used to label things in the world that really do have right and wrong answers. Definitions can NEVER be proved objectively to be the 'right definition'. You could make the common objections of people being able to prove that their own definition of objective morality was the right one... against anything. The point is whether ANY definition maps correctly onto the real world. The fact people disagree over definitions is irrelevant.

You've missed the point. It's not about choosing the "right" definition. It's the fact that we are begging the question: defining good and bad IN TERMS OF how we feel, and then acting deepity when we find that feelings are intrinsically good or bad. It's like defining a table as an object a flat top, and then saying that a table is intrinsically flat.

In the case of feelings, when we say they are "good," it means that we like the feeling and would like to have more of it. We define feeling good in those positive motivational terms. Defining something as A, and then finding that the thing possesses the quality of A, is not very useful, although with enough words it can sound deepity enough to impress young hippies.