After my last post I briefly regretted adding "aware" to the list of our qualities that put us at the apex of the known universe for the same reason you focused on it (rather than the nest two listed: "capable" and "accomplished"). Awareness has no value by itself, but it's unique to our species and at the root of our capability leading to our accomplishments.
I admired the way you prefaced the brevity of an explanation above as a, "…thumbnail sketch of what ought to take a serious philosopher at least a thick volume to closely reason and explore" It's a challenge to illustrate these ideas without sounding like some kind of geek, ether an academic nerd or a Star Trek conventioneer who's never had a girlfriend. The 359 word comparison of our cognition to that behind a spider's web is interesting to some, but it's a complete miss direction. It's not our cognition but our accomplishments that put us at the apex of the universe as we know it.
Briefly going back to the spider example, if the hive reached out to manage the environment and life of a planet, construct diverse cities, tunnel through mountains and stretch to the moon to create a civilization millions of times more intricate, dynamic and "progressive" (in the universal sense) than anything seen since intercellular biology (perhaps even exceeding that), then I think we'd be sharing that apex. But in order for that to happen, those spiders would need extraordinary awareness/intelligence, language, government and philosophy. Hmm… we've come full circle back to the value of "awareness".
I think I've qualified the claim that we're at the apex with a phrase like "as far as we know" more than once. To keep this succinct, I don't think that it needs repeating each time it's restated. And if something greater than humanity's one day discovered, it'll at least put a tremor through both our ideologies.
I'd be interested to know if you have any further challenges to this concept of a natural model for defining the objective of good. I've never had the opportunity to defend it to even to this degree. I think that I've batted back each of your challenges pretty convincingly, but their may still be some obvious loose ends.
The concept's more or less taken from Objectivism, but I get bored with the tedium and precision demanded by Objectivists, and prefer to hang out closer to the real world. But when I promote it here, It usually just rolls past the interests of others or they get frustrated and evade the issue in various ways.
I look forward to replying to you, perhaps this evening. I have to get some work done now. Thanks for an interesting and civil discussion.
Let me ask you a question--can there be disagreements between rational men?
Did you throw in the towel? ;^]