I think (and private_messaging should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) that what private_messaging is saying is, in effect, that before you can assign utilities to objects or worldstates or whatever, you've got to be able to recognize those objects/worldstates/whatever. I may value "humans", but what is a "human"? Since the actual reality doesn't have a "human" as an ontologically fundamental category--it simply computes the behavior of particles according to the laws of physics--the definition of the "human" which I assign utility to must be given by me. I'm not going to get the definition of a "human" from the universe itself.