In the contest of who is more principled, more just, it’s as though the outcome really does determine or confirm, rather than serve as the alibi for, rights and entitlements won by brute force.

Yet it’s difficult to say whether ‘brute-ness’ of this kind is to be identified as belonging to the ‘brute’ cognitive processes Jason Baehr describes as “strictly automatic or mechanistic” ways of forming relevant beliefs, beliefs formed via the “brute or mechanistic part” of one’s cognitive nature, “strictly brute or mechanical” cognitive processes, or “entirely brute or natural” perceptual habits (Oxford UP 2012, 39-43).

In a limited sense, the question is analogous to one that asks whether the kinds of reactionary forces used in systems of government to contain mass unrest does or should borrow from the laws of physics used to explain the disorder of entropic systems. To point out the difference there between ‘mass’ and ‘mass’ is similar again in concern to the peculiar usage of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ in order to shrug off things like our present humanitarian crises rather than consider Darwin’s imaginative use of the phrase to safeguard against the dangers of unorthodoxy in his time (P. Dear, History of Science; Cambridge, March 2016).

Yet the question at hand seems to involve more than a restriction of terms to guard against their overextension. Restoring proper context doesn’t help to clear up the question of “status” with regard to so-called “low-grade processes” of brute or mechanistic cognitive operations as Baehr discusses them, particularly when he extends these operations to explain knowledge premised on appeals to bare survival, while reserving another explanatory route for “higher grade” knowledge that takes “significant effort to acquire, e.g. philosophical, historical, scientific, moral, or religious knowledge” (48). What are we to make of a separation along these lines when it comes to claims to existence in the assertion of human rights, or the affirmation of existence in a religious context (de Libera in Cassin, ed. 2004, 475)? Is one or both of these at the end of the day having to do “merely” with brute survivalist instincts? By extension, what is being implied, and what is permitted to undergo diminution and dismissal, when to say “J’existe” is excluded from more ‘virtuous’ forms of intellectual, moral, and religious knowledge?

To be clear, Baehr’s project actually seems in part intended to complicate the conventions that lead us to assume intellectual virtue, particularly where they are forged at the expense of forms of knowledge considered more ‘ordinary’, i.e. resulting from guessing correctly or from so-called ‘coincidence’ – explanations whose dismissive undertones have led to their appraisal in Baehr and elsewhere as “objectionably uninformative” contributions to knowledge (38).

The example here, of a tendency to set brute cognition apart from intellectual virtue and the subsequent questioning of such a thing as the latter, must belong to a tradition of separating out instances of morality, intelligence, and creativity from blanket attributions of virtue. A repetition of this impulse can be seen with D. W. Gotshalk’s attempt to free creativity from such constraints:

In ordinary language, to be ‘creative’ is to be exceptionally virtuous. There is something elevated and very special about the ‘creative’ person. On the other hand, for the process philosopher all actual occasions are creative. As Whitehead remarks, it is as creative to knock your neighbor down as to perform any expressive act. Both are advances into novelty. (R.A. Smith, ed. 1970, 286)

Where I retain the virtue criterion to deny the lesser evil access for having affronted my moral sensibility, there is further the question of whether the small-scale indignation returns to confront me as a greater evil in a technosphere that seems to pass itself off as karmic law. Here, scores of little deaths supply the certainty demanded in an equivalent greatness of demand. Natural forces are accounted for in an impersonal business sense, three hundred thousand evacuated, five reported deaths, made to correspond, to stand in for an absence of the relation which would give a less self-evident truth. It’s like insisting, in the strict metrical sense, on the objective time of a broken clock for the greatly expanded “inner time consciousness” it affords. Individual destinies play out on a well-marked cosmos. Sometimes resolution is denoted. “The child/infant/baby sleeps.”

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