In the ending of Horizon: Zero Dawn, after delivering the planet's life forms from another machine-born annihilation, Aloy finds the body of her genetic "mother" and the woman who spearheaded the plan to let supercomputers produce and regulate new life after Zero Day, the day when rogue machines would exterminate all life on Earth. She had sacrificed herself to keep the plot for new life safe from the robots, giving her life for that of a future humanity, a thing seldom done with female characters. As Aloy finds the corpse, she listens to a recording of her genetic mother about a childhood experience where the latter's own mother told her that intelligence counts for nothing if it is not used to make the world better and serve life, not death. Elizabet says that she would have wanted her daughter, if she had one, to be compassionate in a way that assumes the existence of morality, and a very particular yet vague kind of moral system at that, implicitly agreeing with her mother.
It is by necessity the other way around: since (1) all truth is metaphysically grounded in and epistemologically revealed by reason, (2) kindness could only be morally valid in itself if it is morally mandatory or at least good but optional (supererogatory), and (3) there is no amoral reason to be kind other than subjective preference or manipulative pragmatism, then kindness is meaningless and neither rational nor good on its own. Whether kindness is good is entirely dependent on whether certain other things are true, such as if morality exists and if kindness is actually part of righteousness. Of course, logical possibility and necessity are matters of pure reason, which is grasped by the intellect (a person's degree of alignment with reason, the extent to which they recognize logical axioms and do not make assumptions, is their intelligence).
Logical necessity is true no matter if it is acknowledged or convenient, and no one can even understand what kindness is or what its relationship to other things is apart from grasping these truths of reason. No, kindness is not what makes reason or intelligence valid (the two are distinct as mentioned). It is reason that dictates the nature of kindness so that the latter depends on the former! Even if kindness is morally good, but a person only practices it for emotional satisfaction or subjective persuasion rather than to live in alignment with objective reality, making assumptions or ignoring necessary truths about the issue, he or she is an utter goddamn fool. This is not exactly a popular truth, but it could only be this way, and no amount of emotional dislike is relevant.
Sobeck, her mother, and Aloy operate on moral intuition, or conscience. None of the aforementioned truths is ever even teased at by Aloy or Elizabet because neither of them is rational despite the thin facade, in the perceptions of the other non-rationalist characters, of them being intelligent, good, and holistically deep people. The ending of Horizon: Zero Dawn is structured to be emotionally impactful in light of the preceding story (for which it is executed well on a narrative level) rather than affirmative of logical truths about reason itself, the grasp of reason by conscious beings (the intellect), or anything verifiable about the connection between kindness and morality. It is set up to make kindness--which Aloy absolutely deviated from when she went along with things like the planned auctioning of Dervahl to be tortured to death for perhaps as long as other tribes could technologically muster--seem so important that all else is trivial by comparison when this could not possibly be the case.
Torturous execution of the aforementioned kind is in itself far worse than death, and thus worse than mere murder of any number of people (Dervahl schemes for this and has already murdered), so Aloy is already a massive hypocrite if she truly believes the ideas espoused in the final recording from Sobeck at the game's finale. Aloy's supposed kindness is inconsistent, but even if it was not, she, like Elizabet, would still be an imbecile if she thought that conscience or the facilitation of pragmatic unity makes kindness morally good as opposed to subjectively preferred or socially beneficial. She would be even more in error if she conflates the inherent truths of reason, such as axioms, with the comprehension of them by a mind or, even worse, what arbitrarily "makes sense" to her or anyone else as non-rationalists in the grip of assumptions.
Either way, kindness cannot be good unless morality, not just moral feelings, exists and is such that this is true, and morality cannot exist unless it is logically possible, and without the mental comprehension of the inherent, objective truths of reason that start with axioms, nothing about kindness would even be knowable, including its basic, core nature as something benevolent. Elizabet Sobeck's mother and likely she as well are completely in error; Horizon: Zero Dawn is not concerned with exploring not only deep philosophical concepts (which it succeeds in doing), but also verifiable logically necessary truths about those concepts, as the greatest of fiction does--for all necessary truths are still inescapably true even in fiction. It is rather aimed at emotionally persuading players that kindness is the grandest aspect of reality or making players who already have assumed this feel justified in their delusions. As great a game as it is, and as philosophically charged as it is from start to finish, Zero Dawn is very much a game with a narrative focus chosen by irrationalists for irrationalists.
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