I am indeed essentially invoking a tautology here - which is actually how I've described it to you myself previously (1). But I don't see this as me acting the dictator, and forcing my definition on everyone "cause I say so". Rather, it's me defining it for myself - and anticipating that everyone else will be able to do likewise, and come up with the same definition for themselves. It's simply the self acknowledgment that everything I consciously do is ultimately to bring about an end that I desire - which I assume everyone can relate to. I used the words "hopes, joys, pleasures" as concrete examples of feelings that we desire, but really I'm just referring to our desire itself.
I'm going to suggest that if we say that something "has meaning", that's essentially the same thing as us saying that something "matters". And if something "matters", I think what that really means is that it has predictive or explanatory value - relative to a chosen "rhetorical goal" or "telos". If a moth is missing a wing, that "matters", and is "meaningful" because it allows us to predict that the moth can't fly, and to explain why we don't see it flying - and therefore "matters", and is "meaningful", relative to the "goal" of flying. And we could in turn say that the moth's ability (or lack thereof) to fly is "meaningful" relative to the "goal" of surviving and reproducing.
And at some level, our "wants" or "desires" fit this same pattern. If I "want" to experience a feeling of pleasure, that may lead me to eat a scoop of ice cream. Or, if I remember previously having bowel trouble after consuming dairy, I might instead opt to get my pleasure by taking a hot shower. In either case, the fact that I have some desire to experience pleasure is predictive of my attempts to reach that state somehow, which may be predictive and relavent to the "rhetorical goals" of either consuming calories, or getting clean and warm - which in turn have bearing, and "matter", relative to the "rhetorical goals" of survival and reproduction.
And in both the case of the moth and the human, we can of course take a step further back, and ask the extent to which the survival of one specimen is predictive, or "matters" with the respect to the survival of the whole species, or of the trajectory of the universe at large. And when we start making those jumps, I think it starts to become apparent how arbitrary all of these "goals" are. And so if we ask, for example, whether it "matters" if a person survives, or a society thrives, or if humanity eventually dies out, or goes on to become extra-terrestrial, the answer will always depend on what "goal" we are assuming in the context of the question.
So I think that then begs the question of how we might choose the goal. Is there any goal that is somehow less arbitrary than any other goal?
Certainly, for any given system, we can always ask questions about what conditions would either increase it's changes of sustaining itself and / or growing long term, or increase it's chances of petering out. And if we ask that question, it kind of implies the "goal" of the system's survival. But it still doesn't have to be the goal. Especially when you consider that the conditions that might allow one system to thrive might be antagonistic to the conditions that allow another system to thrive.
And we can apply this to human systems as well. Should we, for example, expect individual humans to adopt the survival of humanity as the ultimate goal from which we derive what we call "morality"? Or perhaps we can instead expect each human to adopt their own survival and / or reproduction as the goal? Or should we instead make no assumptions, and instead allow individual humans to decide for themselves what their morality-arbiting goal is?
But if we do that, we are ultimately leaving it up to...none other than people's desires. And if we leave it up to people's individual desires, I think it's essentially a tautology that what we'll ultimately see is some form of pleasure maximizing. Although technically, it's just the maximizing of whatever it is we want or desire - whether you call that happiness, pleasure, or joy, or something else.
As a bit of an aside, you suggested elsewhere that (if I understood you correctly), rather than joy, etc, the thing we ultimately seek is a feeling of importance (2). But I'd argue that a sense of importance is indistinguishable from a sense of pride. And a sense of pride is really just a feeling of confidence that you are accepted by your community, as I've argued elsewhere (3). So it's still just another side of the coin of survival, along with a feeling of pleasure. And if you break our feelings down into physical and mental, a sense of importance is just a subset of the mental, for which I usually use happiness as the umbrella. But it's all really just *wanting*.
Obviously, our sentient perspectives are generated by our bodies. And obviously, selective pressures have shaped and arranged our bodies such that the sensations and desires and wants of the sentient perspectives that they generate will tend to trigger actions in the body that are likely to improve the body's chances to survive and reproduce. But that still doesn't imply that the body literally has a "telos" of survival nor that the sentient perspective must inherit its "telos" from the body that creates it. The sentient perspective is really just one piece of the system that is the body, and the body is just one piece of the system that is the universe.
So it seems like we can either take a "top down" approach, in which we simply defer all goals to the universal goal - which to me is basically the equivalent of saying that "whatever is, is good". Or we can take a "bottom up" approach, in which we center all goals around individual sentient perspectives. And it just seems obvious to me that, from the perspective of any sentient perspective (i.e. anyone who might be reading this), a sentient perspective will always prioritize itself in any goal setting exercise. And that "prioritizing one's self" really just means "prioritizing one's desires".
And since "morality", as we use that word, implies an "ought", and an "ought" implies a "goal", it seems like there cannot possibly be any basis for morality other than individual goals, dictated by individual desires.
(1) https://nebulasaurus.medium.com/what-this-says-to-me-is-that-you-think-survival-is-the-principle-of-most-importance-rather-than-2205459a4317
(2) https://ichoran.medium.com/okay-i-agree-with-practically-everything-youve-said-except-that-here-you-re-not-even-being-df9121d190b8
(3) https://medium.com/@nebulasaurus/is-pride-a-childish-emotion-72036ad5dfa0
