It's part of the mind either way, and a "brilliant person" isn't referring to just their intelligence. E.g. nobody with empathy would call even a highly intelligent doctor torturing and experimenting on prisoners "brilliant", without any qualifiers or caveats.
Lacking empathy is a defect of the mind I would say, and clarity refers to the whole of it, just like health refers to all of it. A person who has healthy fingernails but has cancer isn't healthy, and a person that excels at specific technial problems, but isn't even bad, but completely absent, when it comes to other very basic ones, isn't brilliant.
> morality is highly subjective
And the word "brilliant" is not? "Highly" is just padding: Morality is subjective, and so is everything else, ultimately. It's not a magically different kind of thing to think about, it's just one of the more basic ones.
> For me, the crux of the matter is that people use Antifa to claim that both the left and the right engage in equal amounts of violence or that both are equally morally bad/good.
For me that's simply irrelevant, because how "bad" your enemy is doesn't give you any additional leeway. You can use violence to directly prevent greater violence, for example in self-defense. Throwing milk-shakes at someone achieves nothing. Even when a murderer is arrested, the cops don't get to spit at them while they wait for trial. It doesn't matter in the least how bad a person is. It's a red herring from the word go, due process and same rights for all is a very clear standard, and normalizing violating it because "others are worse", leaves us with nothing.
It's not my system, it's reality, there is no objective morality, and even where people agree on many things, they don't have the exact same opinions and reasons for having them, and so on. That's at all not contingent on me giving you a satisfying answer on such a tricky question about a site I don't even know.
Sure, but all meaning and interpretation of life, all ideas on what is right, and so on, are subjective. There is nothing wrong with that, since it's not like objectivity actually exists on the other side of the scale. When it comes to moral questions, what is "objectively right" simply doesn't apply, and isn't needed.
If everybody simply stuck to treating others how they would want to be treated, we'd live in a much better world already, even if it wasn't "perfect", and even if there were disagreements, and it all still always subject to constant learning and reflection.
Our main problems don't stem from out confusion about what we think is right (and by "we" I mean each of us as the individuals that actually exist, not as a collective abstraction), but from wanting what we think is right for ourselves, while having double standards for others, and rationalizations for those.
We don't all have to agree on everything all the time. You strive in a direction by moving in that direction, there is no end point, no destination, no way to "complete" the process. There doesn't have to be. Life is messy like that, even when people are generally healthy and happy and kind to each other.
In order to combat ongoing human rights violations, human rights have to be abolished bit by bit. There is nothing benign or misguided about this to me, this is calculated and predatory.
Omniscience and omnipotence by states and corporations lead by very human, sometimes sick people, may make the world "safer" from small fish (and even that is not clear), but might also make powerful sadists untouchable. It might make fixing the problems we have with corruption and abuse impossible, the final kicking away of the ladder.
You think it can't get worse, wait until the trap actually snaps shut. That happened in Germany in the 1930s and people watched on like it was a dream, a game, or over soon.
What if that happens again, but there is no outside world to invade and rescue anyone from themselves? What if it's not done by crazy narcissists bent on destruction and self-destruction, but "just" people who like and got used to power, and will not ever let it go?
I know I'm fearmongering here, but I just can't help but extrapolate and be extremely concerned. And I know I'm not alone, I just suck at expressing it without coming across wide-eyed. But there's better people for that, example Eben Moglen, from "Freedom of thought requires free media" ( http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t... )
> We’re going to live in a world unless we do something quickly in which our media consume us and spit in the government’s cup. There will never have been any place like it before and if we let it happen, there will never be any place different from it again.*
and
> We have a responsibility, we know. That’s how Berlin became the freest city that I go to because we know, because we have a responsibility, because we remember, because we have been on both sides of the wall. That must not be lost now. If we forget, no other forgetting will ever happen. Everything will be remembered. Everything you read, all through life, everything you listened to, everything you watched, everything you searched for.
> Surely we can pass along to the next generation a world freer than that. Surely we must. What if we don’t?
> What will they say when they realize that we lived at the end of a thousand years of struggling for freedom of thought. At the end, when we had almost everything, we gave it away, for convenience, for social networking. Because Mr. Zuckerberg asked us to. Because we couldn’t find a better way to talk to our friends. Because we loved the beautiful pretty things that felt so warm in the hand. Because we didn’t really care about the future of freedom of thought, because we considered that to be someone else’s business. Because we thought it was over. Because we believed we were free. Because we didn’t think there was any struggling left to do. That’s why we gave it all away.
> Is that what we're gonna tell them?
> Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die.
Writing software is not a contest, period :) It may be for some, it may be for you, but you don't get to sign up other people for it without their consent.