True, but average people with nefarious morals might look comparatively brilliant because the scope of total things they can and are willing to do is greater, whereas decent people would just self-select out of those activities.

Additionally, and tragically, because they work in a field with a psychological cost, their market wages are higher to compensate, meeting a second metric simple folk use to judge merit/competency.

And so outsiders look in and say "brilliant", when really it's just a bunch of otherwise average performers, paid well, willing to do what others won't and open to a greater palette of possible actions because of it.

To quote BR from thank you for smoking: "We don't sell Tic Tacs for Christ's sake. We sell cigarettes! And they're cool and available and addictive. The job is almost done for us!"

True, but we shouldn't celebrate brilliance when it's applied to do morally reprehensible things, like the OP was doing (intended or not).

How could one possess "exceptional clarity and agility of intellect" and then not apply it to moral questions?

The Orthogonality Thesis[1][2] states that the ethics of a given mind is orthogonal to its intelligence.

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orthogonality_thesis [2] https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Orthogonality_An...

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.

Moral questions require empathy. If you have no empathy, moral questions only interest you to the extent that they imply potential benefits for you.

Plus morality is highly subjective and beliefs on what is moral varies by individual.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_reasoning