Garbage. Right after I say I don't argue so much in these comments, you formulate part of my comment as a strawman argument. There was no argumentative form in that quoted part. I just challenged you to explicate those terms without resorting to the concept of happiness. And I drew no conclusion. So that strawman of yours is just wasting my time.

And your cat example shows you're misunderstanding the point. The point isn't that to satisfy your desires, you have to practice philosophy and understand the concept of happiness at a philosophical level. Obviously, both people and animals can be happy (contented rather than depressed or anxious) without doing philosophy.

The challenge, rather, is for the economist to explicate the relevant technical terms without presupposing a basic normative concept of happiness. Eventually, you see, the economist will have to move from pseudoscience to philosophy, in laying out the full meaning of her models.

The economist assumes we order our desires in a hierarchy of preferences. So what's at the foundation of the hierarchy? Utility. And what's economic utility? It's the subjectively defined general satisfaction we get from a purchased item or service. And what's the difference between the general search for satisfaction (for maximizing utility), and the general search for happiness? The difference is just that the economist stops short of broaching the philosophical issue of what, generally, all these attempts at satisfying our desires is about, especially in so far as the basic pattern depends on a value judgment.

We try to satisfy our desires because we think doing so is good for us. In other words, we do so to make ourselves happy. Scientistic economists leave out the normative aspect to make their discourse sound more scientific, but that doesn't change the obvious fact of what the attempt to satisfy our desires is for.