Starting and fighting wars is a morally hazardous business. The philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe describes the peril well: in starting wars, our common foibles have too often led nations to “wrongly think themselves to be in the right.”¹ The deadly serious work of fighting wars presents to the military professional in combat even more pitfalls: “Human pride, malice and cruelty are so usual that it is true to say that wars have been mostly mere wickedness on both sides. . . . The probability is that warfare is injustice, that a life of military service is a bad life.”² We might disagree with Anscombe’s estimations of the probability that we will fail, but certainly no other context presents so many opportunities for the worst kinds of immorality. In the face of this danger, some people have actually embraced war as a moral catastrophe, allowing without condemnation any use or abuse of power in international relations and any method of fighting in the prosecution of war. Fortunately, many more of us rightly set our faces against this kind of moral nihilism with respect to war.

With the opposition to nihilism and its radical permissiveness should come yet another worry: that we will do a poor job of formulating our moral judgments (and the accompanying, well-intentioned attempts to remedy or prevent problems). We must not proceed naively, too quickly, or from the “outside” without an appreciation for the real nature of the moral difficulties found in statecraft and the prosecution of warfare. Numbers of thinkers have avoided these risks, become wise and informed specialists in the morality of war, and made many helpful contributions to coping with the thorny problems posed in military ethics. Manuel Davenport was one of those thinkers. Indeed, we can understand in retrospect that he was part of an elite group of military ethicists who have done this vital work truly well.³ The thoughtfulness, moral conviction, and discipline he brought to the enterprise of doing and teaching military ethics provide us with a great example. We should reflect on that example and see what lessons it can teach us in the present.

Lessons on How to
Teach Military Ethics

The places where Davenport taught military ethics allowed his work as a teacher to have maximal reach and impact. Texas A&M University’s Aggie Corps of Cadets normally has as many as 2,000 members, making it one of the largest groups of uniformed students in the country.⁴ During his long tenure at A&M (starting in 1967), Davenport taught a course in military ethics that touched many of the cadets from this rich source of officers. Moreover, he twice served as a distinguished visiting professor at the Air Force Academy, where he taught military ethics to hundreds more future officers. Here is the first lesson to learn: at the very least, we must place courses in military ethics close to all of our commissioning sources.

On many occasions, I observed Davenport engage these undergraduates, who would soon become our leaders; he was always at their level—engaging, memorable, kind, and funny. Yet at the same time, he remained rigorous and intellectually demanding. In time his teaching provided a widespread, positive influence on how many of us throughout the armed services think about moral problems—influence planted one student at a time. So here is another lesson we should learn in reflecting on Davenport’s teaching: we cannot teach military ethics properly by using only posters, pamphlets, or short motivational speeches. Reasonable concerns for efficiency and leveraging our resources must not trump what is essential to the educational process. Individual engagement, one student at a time and over long periods, is a vital part of the job.

Davenport did more than teach many college-aged students on their way to becoming junior officers. He also taught a number of teachers who then went on to educate many, many more undergraduates. The faculty of the Air Force Academy, like the one at West Point, is staffed in large part (indeed, for many years before the 1990s, almost exclusively) by military officers. Some military professors have long-term relationships with the academy, hold doctorates, and have years of teaching experience. Significantly more members of the military faculty, however, are very junior officers recruited from various career fields to serve a single tour of duty—three or four years—as instructors in lower-level introductory courses. They must hold a master’s degree in the subject they hope to teach. If no qualified officers who hold the advanced degree are available, then the academy sponsors those with the right credentials for 12- to 18-month fellowships. That is, when necessary, the institution will “grow” its own junior instructors.

As one might expect, very few military officers already hold master’s degrees in philosophy, so the lion’s share of them must receive training in graduate schools before coming to work. However, not that many universities can or will accommodate the needs of the services on this count. Short timetables, students who need remedial work, students not able to pursue the doctoral degree, and other complications make it difficult for philosophy departments to admit these officers. But Davenport never said no. Always willing to take academy-bound officers under his wing, he got them through solid master’s programs when others might not have. Through his training of these instructors, he of course touched the moral education of thousands of future military officers at both the Air Force Academy and West Point. Here we find yet another lesson: we must not neglect the institutional structures and programs that provide a pipeline of officers with the requisite expertise for teaching military ethics. Such structures and programs (for example, Air Force–sponsored civilian education, the release of officers from their career fields for these “nonstandard” tours and career paths, military billets on the academy staff, etc.) serve as critical nodes in our larger, systematic effort to produce Air Force officers with strong moral character and sure moral-reasoning skills.

During his yearlong visits to the academy, Davenport served as an important advisor to several department heads and mentored many junior faculty members. On his first visit, he became a confidant to Malham Wakin, a colonel at the time (Wakin called Davenport his “senior consultant”). During his second visit, Col Charles Myers felt much the same way. For younger faculty, Davenport led reading groups, offered advice on publishing, and gave of his time freely and generously, both in the office and in the coffee shop, always ready to help with something puzzling, whether personal or professional. The academy’s philosophy department is unquestionably stronger as a result of the two years he spent there. Other visitors have had similar beneficial influences. Sharing the expertise of senior scholars in this way provides another important precedent for us to follow: we should find ways to replicate this sort of in-residence arrangement at all levels of ethics education in the Air Force. We cannot replace Davenport, but we can hope to benefit from the synergistic and sustained stimulation that a visiting expert can bring to a faculty.

Davenport’s influence spread from more places than just Texas A&M and the Air Force Academy. In the early 1980s, a group of military officers formed an organization that would allow them to present papers on problems in military ethics at a regularly held symposium—the Joint Services Conference on Professional Ethics (JSCOPE, now known as the International Symposium for Military Ethics). When the group sought out Davenport to participate, he agreed immediately, serving on the JSCOPE board as its civilian representative, presenting many ground-breaking papers at the conference, and arranging to have Texas A&M host the conference before it found a permanent home in Washington, DC. Year after year in this organization, he facilitated the thinking not only of undergraduates and their teachers, but also of seasoned professionals still struggling with the same problems—people now in the military, who will make so many of the hugely important decisions in fighting our nation’s wars. So here we find yet another lesson to learn: we should continue to support ongoing ethics forums for military professionals to share ideas and consult with a diverse group of experts. Overall, we should look to Davenport’s teaching as a model for what is possible and find ways to keep that kind of flame burning (with undergraduates, their teachers, and working professionals).

What He Taught: The Doctrines

Besides learning from Davenport’s example as a great teacher with a wide influence, we obviously cannot neglect to survey what he taught. His writing on military ethics reveals helpful contributions in two broad areas. In the first, he articulated and defended some specific doctrines—extensions of or twists on several classic principles in military ethics. In the second, he showed us a method or an approach that we should never fail to appreciate and emulate.

The doctrines he taught ran the gamut of problems in military ethics: moral questions about when to go to war, how we may fight, professional loyalty and competence, and what sorts of people (morally speaking) military professionals should be. He worked broadly inside the just war framework, familiar to any student of military ethics.⁵ Here I highlight only a few of the most important and influential ideas that he developed and promulgated—ideas unique or unusual in the literature on these topics.

To begin, Davenport consistently warned us of the dangers of military power and the absolute necessity they create for certain loyalties in people who make up the military. The dangers fall into two general categories. First, if given too much power, the military typically does not relinquish it; hence, the military’s influence grows beyond what is fitting, and its function moves from protection toward tyranny. So loyalty to the client state becomes crucially important. The military is and should be characterized by fellowship and a fierce loyalty to the service, yet “duty to client [that is, the client state] must take priority over duty to profession, and in this nation [the United States] we recognize this by the principle of civilian control of the military.”⁶

Connected to this notion was Davenport’s firm defense of a venerable just war principle: that only legitimate and competent authority—removed from the military itself—should make the decision to go to war. Militaries throughout history have been tempted to think they knew better than the citizens they served, with bad results. In most cases, when members of the military “decide who the enemies of their society are and engage on their own in actions aimed at the destruction of such perceived enemies, the stability of their society is endangered rather than preserved.”⁷ Moreover, in Davenport’s view, we should remove the decision to go to war even from people responsible for the day-to-day tasks of direct rule. Rather, the authority for making war should rest with those responsible for appointing and deposing rulers—in the United States, the people or their representatives. History has shown and reason confirms that “those who directly rule are more difficult to depose if they possess the power to make war.”⁸ We must keep the dogs of war on a tight leash.

The second danger of military power manifests itself in the conduct of war. Davenport had grave concerns over soldiers in the midst of fighting made “drunk with power.” Even if these soldiers recognize that the client state and the rules of morality grant their power to do violence, they may be “tempted to exercise the power . . . without restriction and plead that this was necessary in order to serve the best interests” of their clients.⁹ However, military professionals must “distinguish between [their] clients and humanity” and cannot justify destructive actions toward enemy civilians simply because such actions might promote their own interests or even those of fellow citizens back home. The paramount duty of the military professional is “to promote the safety and welfare of humanity and this duty, [even] according to military law, takes precedence over duties to clients, who as his fellow citizens are but a particular portion of the human race” (emphasis in original).¹⁰ So discrimination between the innocent civilian and the combatant is one of the military professional’s most pressing responsibilities. Temptations to the contrary notwithstanding, this responsibility takes precedence over our other personal or state interests.

This same lexical ordering of values led Davenport to some interesting views on what constituted just cause for warfare. His views were more encompassing than those of people who advocate only for national interests and self-defense: “In an ideal world all violations of human rights should be punished, but in the actual world we may not be able to do this. Our failure to do so, however, should not prevent us from appreciating that our attempts to establish international justice can and should lead to increased moral awareness and an improvement in the actual rules of war. Improvement in the quality of life for all humans is more important than serving our selfish, national interests.”¹¹

Davenport also had strong views on the kinds of people we need in the military and stumped for the personal qualities he considered indispensable for military service. Elaborating on some ideas of Wakin, Albert Schweitzer, and others, he pointed especially to moral integrity and expert technical competence. He called for courage (both physical and moral), a sense of calling, and a wholeness of person—and made these strong moral demands even in the military professional’s private life. For example, Davenport set his face against toleration of adultery for the military officer, even when it remains private: “A person whose continued existence depends upon deceiving himself and others cannot be trusted to execute assigned duties or to provide truthful reports which are subjectively unpleasant or harmful. Such a person . . . cannot be a military professional worthy of respect.”¹²

He endorsed these special and demanding military virtues because they are necessary for military functioning. Now this functional approach is a fairly standard way of understanding the justification of military virtues. All along, however, Davenport noticed that these virtues must promote not only military excellence, but also (and at the same time) a rich notion of the good life for anyone, in or out of the military. After all, what counts as a moral military should not be conceived in isolation from the rest of the moral life—in fact, a moral military will be moral precisely because it properly preserves a number of important human goods. Virtues for the military professional and those for a good human life as a whole must go hand in hand and blend into a seamless consistency. So Davenport’s ultimate groundings for all these demands on military character (that is, military excellence and the overarching idea of a good human life) exclude the possibility of judging a Nazi a virtuous fighter simply because, on a certain level, he was a good soldier.

In another theme that runs through Davenport’s work, he proposed that the bureaucratic and abstract nature of the military structure creates a number of problems, especially for the military character. In the first place, the structure of the military tends to aggravate its remoteness and isolation from the rest of society. This in turn creates a tendency not to respond adequately when unethical demands are made of the services. As a case in point, he thought that the military frequently finds its true needs unhealthily subordinated to purely selfish political concerns. He also believed that other features of the military structure create problems as well: an all-volunteer force does not adequately represent all walks of life, the military does not effectively recruit enough especially competent people, and the bureaucracy motivates a kind of careerism among officers that focuses merely on promotion rather than real excellence. But Davenport judged that the basically bureaucratic and abstract structure of any large military remains the only one it can have and still perform its function. Hence, “the military organization must [when necessary] change its personnel and its responses to the social environment so that within the existing structure there is a greater commitment to the military objective.”¹³ Again, he underscored the need for certain virtues or character traits—certain kinds of people—in the military. These, then, are some of the unique doctrines that Davenport taught.

What He Taught: The Method

Understanding the method by which Davenport developed and taught these doctrines (a method I discerned, for the most part, by his example) proves by far the more difficult lesson to learn; nevertheless, it is one we sorely need in the practice of military ethics. In sum, he was masterfully subtle—always evenhanded and never succumbing to the temptations of oversimplification or dogmatism. He said very clearly that we “should not rush headlong” to our judgments, warning against the “danger and allure . . . of moral shortcuts” and insisting that we engage in “constant questioning of the actual rules of war rather than inflexible adherence to [simplistic] moral absolutes.”¹⁴

Indeed, Davenport resisted all forms of formulaic thinking about military ethics, showing us instead a kind of moral wisdom that grows out of a real humility before this difficult subject matter. In contrast to the deceptive simplicity and clarity of his writing, he had a profound appreciation of moral complexity. At the foundation of Davenport’s thinking, we find the avoidance of one-dimensional theoretical commitments not true to the nature of moral experience. He frequently appealed to utilitarian arguments but was not simply a utilitarian; he spoke of moral duties but was not at base a Kantian; and he occasionally appealed to biblical principles or theologically informed philosophers but gave them no privileged place in his thinking.¹⁵ In the same vein, he realized that moral theories are often not fine grained enough to help in the balancing of competing values but that, in addition, sensitive moral judgment and experience are crucial. Moreover, when approaching a concrete moral issue, he sought the facts—all of them—despite knowing the difficulty of discerning which facts have moral relevance. He also understood that knowing the everyday moral rules does not at once guarantee that we will know which ones properly fit with the situations at hand—or how. And he saw that sometimes a problem involves a lack of moral motivation or a failure to possess the virtues (rather than a failure to understand them). I could list more of his cautions. The important point is that Davenport knew that no simple algorithm guarantees a correct moral judgment, which is as much an art as it is a science. In all but the easiest cases, there is no simple way to proceed.

Davenport’s understanding of moral judgment is reminiscent of something the philosopher Jay Rosenberg once said about philosophy in general: learning to do good philosophy is something that cannot be reduced to a simple set of rules. Sometimes we must first see how it is done—like learning to dance by watching someone else and then joining in.¹⁶ In the same spirit, let us look at how Davenport handled some tough cases of applied moral reasoning by examining some instances of his method in action.

Take, for example, Davenport’s analysis of a dilemma faced by Gen Laurence Kuter, who participated in planning the firebombing of Dresden during World War II. When Kuter’s papers and some other previously classified documents became available in the 1990s, Davenport studied the memos associated with the general’s decision to participate. He considered the targeting of this largely civilian population center with incendiaries immoral, amounting to a form of terrorism. Apparently, even Kuter believed something similar and held to the idea that “terrorism, including area bombing, was always wrong.”¹⁷ So we might think that if Kuter held these views yet still planned the raid, he must have been a weak and compromising sort—the kind Davenport so often claimed was out of place in the military.

But he refused to engage in such a characterization of Kuter. Why? He noted that Kuter tried mightily to dissuade his superiors from carrying out the raid, but he failed: “What seems evident is that he thought he had gained as much moral ground as he could hold, [and] that to push further might jeopardize his future moral credibility.”¹⁸ That said, how did Davenport think the moral person should respond in these terrible circumstances?

Thus, compromising one’s principles without objection or second thought is cowardly and easy (easy at least in the moment). In fact, a refusal to compromise on moral principle is almost without exception the courageous, difficult, and proper course—for example, when no doubt exists about the immorality or illegality of an order, integrity demands nothing less than firm disobedience. Davenport, however, admitted the existence, on very rare occasion, of fearsome circumstances filled with terrible pressures and conflicting duties in which a simple and high-minded refusal might also be the relatively easy, yet improper, course. Was Kuter really sure about the immorality of the raid? If the general resigned after vigorously making his objections known, who would replace him? Would the next such raid prove easier without Kuter in place? Without him, what are the chances of stopping another one? Would anyone challenge the moral consciences of his superiors? Would the details of the planning take any steps to mitigate the immorality he perceived? With all these questions open, the right course is not obvious. Michael Walzer notices a similar difficulty in such rare cases when we must do something, even though we judge it wrong, as part of an overall concern for doing the right thing: “We say of such people that they have dirty hands. . . . [Those] with dirty hands, though it may be the case that they had acted well and done what their office required, must nonetheless bear a burden of responsibility and guilt.”²⁰ Whether or not we agree with Davenport (about the general idea or whether it was properly invoked in Kuter’s case), his suggestion should give us pause before coming to the conclusion that Kuter plainly erred in compromising. Davenport showed us that a moral judgment often involves more than first meets the mind’s eye.

Another case illustrates much the same point. During the 1970s, Davenport, along with Wakin and J. Glenn Gray, was part of the Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference. In the early months of that decade, the conference decided to put forward a public position paper, bearing the name of the conference, condemning the Vietnam War in clear terms. At the time, doing so would have been easy and (in those academic circles) uncontroversial. Wakin, at the time a colonel in the Air Force, asked the conference not to speak with one voice. If it proceeded as planned, he and other military philosophers in the group would have to withdraw. Davenport stood with the military officers even though he believed the war immoral, all things considered. Although others appeared not to understand, he understood the webs of loyalty in which the military officers found themselves. He respected their position and refused to take a simplistic view, even when it appeared on the surface to be the moral “high ground.”

Davenport’s reaction to problems of false reporting in the military provides yet another example of his careful reasoning. In the 1980s, beginning in Vietnam and continuing for over a decade, the military discovered a rash of false reporting—about battlefield events, maintenance, readiness, and a host of other things, big and small. Hysteria about the moral fabric of the military had started to spread among commentators. Yet Davenport would not jump on that bandwagon. He had previously done research on the killing of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto at the end of World War II. Who shot him? The pilots on the mission did not agree, but Davenport did not assume, as many do, that some or all of them were simply lying. In a fine case study, he uncovered how stress and expectations, personal values, and myriad other factors affect perception: “Given the stress produced by combat situations and multiplied by the increasing complexity of weapons and communications systems and in view of the fact that such stress can accentuate the normal tendency to respond to stimuli according to subjective values, what is remarkable is not that there are so many false reports concerning military operations but that, relative to the number possible, there are so few.”²¹ Ever the fair-minded and clear-headed analyst, he refused to join a frenzy that had no grounding—and he tried to dissuade us from doing so.

Davenport also weighed in on the controversial issues of gays in the military and women serving in combat roles, taking moderate positions at odds with both conservative and radical views on these problems. In defending those stances, he insisted on a careful examination of the actual consequences of proposed policies for the services and our nation. Before excluding women from combat on the basis of alleged bad consequences, we must first do the empirical work by showing the difficulty of integrating them or demonstrating that their presence would affect readiness. (Although Davenport had doubts about the existence of such evidence, he patiently awaited the verdict of actual experience.) Before excluding gays from service for similar reasons, we must first do the empirical work by showing that their behavior will seriously impair our ability to accomplish the military mission. Davenport simply did not abide a priori arguments or quick solutions rooted in preconceptions, authority, or ideology.

Conclusion

All of us, both in the military and out, have benefited greatly from what Davenport did—and the wise, careful way he did it. To my mind, he set the bar high in the practice and teaching of military ethics, and we must strive to meet that standard. Present and future generations of leaders and fighters need thorough exposure to the moral problems embedded in what they do. They need thorough education in the philosophical skill and practical wisdom they will need to negotiate these problems. To satisfy these needs, we must (1) persuade first-rate scholars and teachers, in and out of the military, to continue working in military ethics, (2) encourage them to do their work in places (such as academies, war colleges, and conferences for military professionals) where they will have an impact on the military at all levels, and (3) set up and maintain the kinds of institutional policies, practices, and support (such as teacher education, assignment priorities, in-residence visitor arrangements, travel funding, etc.) that will make all this possible.

*Manuel Davenport, a generally recognized and influential military ethicist, was known by many people, especially in our Air Force, for his leadership, moral courage, kindness, helpfulness, and wickedly funny sense of humor. I think that the sixth anniversary of his passing (he died on 31 August 2000) presents an apt occasion to remember this man, his impact and example, and the unique methods and doctrines he taught.

Thanks to Dr. Robin Smith, head of the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University, for inviting me to present the first version of this article in 2001. Many thanks to the dozens of people who spoke to me about Manuel Davenport as I prepared that first version. Recently, Dr. James Toner of the Air War College made a number of very helpful suggestions. Indeed, all of the editors at Air and Space Power Journal who worked with me to bring this to publication exhibited the patience of Job. I am grateful to them all.

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Notes

1. G. E. M. Anscombe, “War and Murder,” in War, Morality, and the Military Profession, 2d ed., ed. Malham M. Wakin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 286.

2. Ibid.

3. Two others come to mind in the context of thinking about Davenport: J. Glenn Gray and Malham Wakin. I mention them because it is worth noting that in the early years of Davenport’s career, while still teaching in Colorado, he cemented personal and professional friendships with these two. Their influences undoubtedly contributed to setting him on his way.

4. “About the Corps,” Texas A&M University Corps of Cadets, http://www.aggiecorps.org/home/about.

5. For readers not familiar with just war thinking, many fine summaries of this general approach are available, which I will not attempt to re-create or summarize here. Among many others, see James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience: How Shall Modern War Be Conducted Justly? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1961); Nicholas G. Fotion, Military Ethics: Looking toward the Future (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1990); or Martin L. Cook, The Moral Warrior: Ethics and Service in the U.S. Military (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).

6. Manuel Davenport, The Fellowship of Violence: Readings for Military Ethics [a complete collection of his work on military ethics] (Acton, MA: Copley Publishing Group, 2000), 4.

7. Ibid., 79.

8. Ibid., 80.

9. Ibid., 5.

10. Ibid., 2–3.

11. Ibid., 181.

12. Ibid., 171.

13. Ibid., 29.

14. Ibid., 144, 181.

15. According to utilitarian thinking about the nature of morality, looking only to the consequences of actions, evaluated in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number, is morality’s foundational principle. German philosopher Immanuel Kant assigns a similar foundational role to certain primitive duties—but those not determined by mere consequences.

16. Jay F. Rosenberg, The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners, 2d ed. (Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984), vii.

17. Davenport, Fellowship of Violence, 116. For a contrasting characterization of the raid, consult Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004) (reviewed by Maj Paul G. Niesen, Air and Space Power Journal 19, no. 3 [Fall 2005]: 122–24).

18. Davenport, Fellowship of Violence, 119.

19. Ibid., 120.

20. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 3d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 323. See also his “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1972): 160–80.

21. Davenport, Fellowship of Violence, 64.

Contributor

Dr. J. Carl Ficarrotta (BA, Mercer University; MA, Emory University; PhD, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill) is a professor of philosophy at the US Air Force Academy, where he has taught for 13 years. He speaks regularly on the topic of military ethics to audiences throughout the United States and Canada. The editor of The Leader’s Imperative: Ethics, Integrity, and Responsibility (Purdue University Press, 2001), Dr. Ficarrotta has also published a number of articles on topics in theoretical and applied ethics, including “Are Military Professionals Bound by a Higher Moral Standard?” Armed Forces and Society, 1997.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University

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