What is a Good Materialist?

	Searle is right about functional theories being centered around goals or outcomes that we deem important (like assigning a purpose to the heart pumping blood instead of just saying that it just does that, period). Anything normative (like the goal of pumping blood, in this case) is going to detract from the empirical evidence and will assign to the system (like the circulatory system) an "as-if" intentional state.  On the surface, this may be a good argument for eliminativism (despite the fact that Searle, himself, is a strong defender of phenomenal consciousness); however, there are those like Van Gulick, Goldman, Flanagan, and Block that espouses that consciousness is the result of interactions between different processes on a global level.  This opens the door to exploring phenomena like consciousness, freewill, and other such concepts and either tries to make allowances for them into our materialistic theories or to come up with an argument of why we can't.  And so, the question is "Which is good materialism?  Eliminative materialism or 'robust' materialism?"
	Eliminative materialism is in keeping with the overall philosophy of empiricism.  What really is relevant is what we actually see or experience. We don't see anything that could lend itself to something like consciousness.  All we really see is behavior, and the only reason why we are even interested in consciousness at all is because of introspective inquires of our own mental processes.  This is what lead Descartes into thinking that there was non-material thinking stuff in the first place.  However, there's a problem here.  On what grounds can an eliminativist say that none of what is expressed in this non-material stuff is important?  Any argument along those lines would be normative.  If the eliminativist wants to eliminate consciousness as irrelevant and confused, then he or she will have to rely on a normative position that attributes to this individual (the eliminativist him- or herself) an intentionality.  In other words, there is a conceptual problem, to say the least, in eliminativism.  It is grounded on a normative position that eliminates the very intentionality that is spawned from the position, itself.  This is analogous to Garrett's argument that despair causes the very irrationality and immorality that it predicts (Garrett, The Problem of Despair).  Here, eliminativism totally reduces its very goal into an irrational (or confused) philosophical position.
	"Robust" materialism, on the other hand, doesn't deem that intentions and other normative concepts are irrelevant.  It only says that the underlining processes that make consciousness possible are not normative.  There are blind neurological properties that converge and that allows things like beliefs, intentions, and other subjective notions to take fruit.  Although this 'robustness' doesn't strictly stay in the arena of materialism (or even in the arena of empiricism), it does take concepts not given in sense perception (concepts that are expressed in an immaterial thinking substance) and tries to square them into a materialistic framework that justifies human experience in the first place (and since empiricism is driven on the experiences of the observer, this seems to be a worthwhile venture).
	And so, what makes a good materialist?  The eliminativist tries to be true to the very spirit of empiricist materialism, but he or she then reduces the very goal into a confused position.  On the other hand, the "robust" materialist doesn't stay true to strict empiricist materialism, but the intent is that he or she wants to show that everything that we experience is accountable to a physical substance.  Plus, he or she doesn't collapse the intentionality of taking the materialist position in the first place.  I feel that "robustness" is the way to go, but, then again, I am not a materialist.  What do you think?