:: Maybe. But we don't know and can't know. You're trying to define natural selection as some separate force, some metaphysical power that has a special meaning, in ways that can be taken as ascribing it some purpose reflecting some underlying direction or intelligence, or as something that only some overseeing intelligence can divine. There is a clear danger of "deifying" concepts, and this brings problems. Look at your answer above. Fitness is not an absolute, because it depends on the environment in its most broad sense - an organism might be well fitted to one environment but badly adapted for another, and the environment constantly changes - not least because in part the environment includes all the other individuals present within it. So it isn't really true to think of fitness as something independent of survival and reproduction - in the end that's all there is - fitness is survival and reproduction, there's nothing else. We can measure the contribution of a trait to fitness by estimating its value for survival and reproduction if we have enough representatives of the trait and enough data. But if we can't measure these because we don't have enough data or the sample is too small, it doesn't make sense to say that there is some different force acting or some different explanation. 
 I think you're trapped in endless paradoxes. If you want to keep natural selection as meaning the theory of evolution by natural selection, OK, this may be common useage. But if so, don't try to use this also as a rigorous definition that you can use coherently in a logical argument.