A different way of summarizing telos that may be helpful when discussing this topic is that an object or agent fulfilling it's telos is supposed to be the most fully itself. So, for Aquinas and Aristotle, because the quality that most clearly sets off the category 'human' is "a reasoning animal" actions that interfere with that part of human identity are unnatural and interfere with telos.

This framing is perhaps a little easier to tie back to the last two rereads on Unnatural Categories and Magical Categories since then telos is linked to a partitioning of conceptspace.

One of the most interesting places I've seen "the x-iest x" outside of telos discussions is in Turing Tests, where one of the human controls wins a prize for "the most human human" (i.e. the human that was most frequently rated as human by the judges). There's a book out by one of the contestants, who set out to win that prize. Apparently, one fairly successful strategy is being belligerent. Not the most encouraging result, but interesting.