Unless you use this tautologically to define what "meaningful" means, I don't think that's self-evident at all. And if you do use it tautologically, I don't think it carries any weight beyond saying, "Oh yeah, hopes, joys, pleasures--that's where it's at, cause I say so!"

So--hopes, joys, pleasures, who cares? In some sense, we cannot help but care about our own hope, joy, and pleasure because they form a central part of our motivational system (along with caring about anything at all). Nonetheless, given that we have a good deal of cognitive flexibility, we still retain some leeway to lean into or away from embracing such things, especially in an abstract situation like discussing morality. We can set goals, or resolve to not set goals, with a greater or lesser degree of dependency on individual hopes, joys, and pleasures.

There is no detectable telos to the universe as a whole, but there are plenty of cases where the mechanics of the universe induce a telos-like condition. For instance, the shape of a dolphin is heavily constrained by the physics of moving through a viscous fluid; you simply must, as a dolphin, be decently streamlined, and the mechanics of reproduction also induce an intrinsic scoring mechanism for better-as-a-dolphin: better at leaving more dolphins of similar form, including high degrees of being streamlined and controlling vortices around one's body.

These telos-like mechanistic constraints are not limited to physical form. If we watch a moth bopping itself on a light, or a fruit fly drowning itself in a cup of vinegar, we can from our intellectually sophisticated position recognize that the analogous processes to "hopes, joys, and pleasures" are misfiring rather badly. The moth's light-seeking behavior is "supposed" to help it find a mate in the moonlight, but the system that was adaptive historically is unhelpful with widespread electric lighting. The fruit fly's behavior is "supposed" to lead it to decomposing fruit in which its larvae can grow, but historically acetic acid vapors did not tend to be associated with pools of liquid but rather came from enclosed fruit, so the behavior that used to be appropriate is now misfiring and causing harm.

We can generalize from the specifics of behavior to what-the-behavior-is-for; the moth ought to ignore the porch light and instead fly up towards the moon until it's high enough to make mate-finding easier; the fruit flight ought to decrease its attractive drive for acetic acid and weight more heavily its sensory input for liquids (which can be quite deadly at that scale).

Morality in humans--and indeed, any motivational state at all--is exactly the same sort of thing: it is a tacit acknowledgement of the induced telos of the mechanics of reality. If you are going to exist at all, and if your kind of thing is going to reproduce, then you had very well better get these things right.

This provides an explanation, and a much stronger grounding, for the apparent semi-universality in human morality. You simply cannot do it however you wish because that doesn't work in this universe. We can willfully declare that we don't care about the universe and bop against the light as a religious extremist or whatever, and hey, moths still exist despite how many of them die on outdoor lights.

Now, the universe isn't such that humans have to adore kittens but not deer. Yes, cats are useful to us, and deer are food, but this isn't an existential issue at this point.

But the universe is such that we have to coordinate behavior between a large number of roughly-equally-sophisticated beings who broadly possess relatively low fecundity (meaning reproduction has to be broadly distributed unlike with, say, ants). Cooperation works. Murder-on-a-whim doesn't.

There are lots of cases where our moral sense is triggered yet one can't easily make a claim about mechanistic telos. But there are places where you can provide universal constraints on what can reasonably called morality, at least to the level at which one can reasonably say that the moths and fruit flies are clearly doing the wrong thing.