Originally presented to the Manuel Davenport Memorial Conference, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, on 15 September, 2001. In its present form the essay aims primarily to underscore Davenport's good example as a teacher of military ethics, to present several key and unique themes in his work, and to recommend his effective method for approaching problems of military ethics in general.

According to Manuel Davenport, “The best humorists--Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Bob Hope, and Mort Sahl--share [a] mixture of detachment and desire, eagerness to believe, and irreverence concerning the possibility of certainty. And when they become serious about their convictions--as Twain did about colonialism…they cease to be humorous” (p. 171). I agree with the first part, but not the second. Humor does require disengagement, but not completely such that one has no emotional interest in the subject of the humor. (...) Humor does require some degree of commitment to value, but, as Davenport rightly notes, it “despairs of absolutes.” Following Bertrand Russell, “humorous” and “serious” are not antonyms. Davenport does not provide examples of Twain’s attempts at satire that fail to be humorous due to being serious. I will examine some of the very serious issues Twain addresses through irony and humor, and make the case that his commentary and argument, though serious, is still funny while not falling into frivolity. There is a philosophical thread running through his scathing humor, and it largely centers around his raising awareness about, and then deflating, what I would call a “spirit of seriousness”, borrowing from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. For De Beauvoir, expanding on Sartre’s conception, a spirit of seriousness manifests from serious people who attempt to find comfort in the firm, unchanging foundations and values that are seen to be pre-determined, and thus unquestionable. In Twain’s case, it is arrogance and a presumed sense of certitude. This destructive combination sustains many of the institutions (some of them quite “peculiar”) that he attacks: racism, slavery, colonialism, excesses of capitalism, and the often dogmatic and oppressive nature of organized religion: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know; it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” Complacency, self-satisfaction, disinclination to self-monitoring, all lead to closed mode, or rather, to sustaining a serious mode which can spillover into a “spirit of seriousness” if not checked. The quickest path to a feeling of being certain is cultivated ignorance, where doubt and confusion, ambiguity and fluidity are glossed over. This feeling or attitude, the “spirit of seriousness”, is what Twain confronts with serious humor, motivating his readers to consider where their ideals and reality contradict. (shrink)

Manuel M. Davenport PROFESSIONALS OR HIRED GUNS? LOYALTIES ARE THE DIFFERENCE . In The Contemporary literature of professional ethics, two different ways of ...

Up to now researchers have maintained that Nietzsche’s philosophy has no concept of social justice or have hardly noticed such a concept. On the contrary, this article argues that social justice plays an important role in Nietzsche’s political thinking. It shows that his conception of justice is modelled after Plato’s antique concept of political justice. The main thesis of the paper is that this conception is embodied in Nietzsche’s notion of a well-ordered state or society. An additional thesis concerns the (...) anthropological basis of what Nietzsche holds to be a just social order. This basis is constituted by his conviction that people are not only fundamentally unequal but also extremely different in worth and rank. (shrink)

The artificial intelligence models with machine learning that exhibit the best predictive accuracy, and therefore, the most powerful ones, are, paradoxically, those with the most opaque black-box architectures. At the same time, the unstoppable computerization of advanced industrial societies demands the use of these machines in a growing number of domains. The conjunction of both phenomena gives rise to a control problem on AI that in this paper we analyze by dividing the issue into two. First, we carry out an (...) epistemological examination of the AI’s opacity in light of the latest techniques to remedy it. And second, we evaluate the rationality of delegating tasks in opaque agents. (shrink)

Properly speaking, the corporation, considered as an entity distinct from its members, cannot be morally responsible for wrongful corporate acts. Setting aside (in this abstract) acts brought about through negligence or omissions, we may say that moral responsibility for an act attaches to that agent (or agents) in whom the act "originates" in this sense: (1) the agent formed the (mental) intention or plan to bring about that act (possibly with the help of others) and (2) the act was intentionally (...) brought about through bodily movements over which that agent had direct control (i.e. the kind of direct mental control that I have over the body I refer to as "my" body) and through which the agent carried out his (mental) intention or plan. Corporate acts do not thus originate in some corporate entity distinct from its members because the corporation has neither a mind to form intentions nor a body it directly controls: it lacks the proper mind/body unity. Instead, corporate acts originate in individual autonomous human beings who make up the corporation and who intentionally bring about corporate acts through their own bodily movements. Such human individuals, and not "the corporation," are morally responsible for corporate acts. Moreover, to say that an entity is "morally responsible" for a wrongful act is to say that the entity is liable to blame and punishment. But it is not possible to impose blame and punishment on a corporation without inflicting it on corporate members. Thus, to say that a corporation (as an entity distinct from its members) is "morally responsible" for a wrongful corporate act is to imply that a (possibly innocent) corporate member legitimately may be punished for something for which another entity was morally responsible. This violates the moral principles that underlie blame and punishment. To hold that the corporation can be morally responsible for its acts is to adopt a dangerous organicism. (shrink)

Many prominent accounts of free will and moral responsibility make use of the idea that agents can be responsive to reasons. Call such theories Reasons accounts. In what follows, I consider the tenability of Reasons accounts in light of situationist social psychology and, to a lesser extent, the automaticity literature. In the first half of this chapter, I argue that Reasons accounts are genuinely threatened by contemporary psychology. In the second half of the paper I consider whether such threats can (...) be met, and at what cost. Ultimately, I argue that Reasons accounts can abandon some familiar assumptions, and that doing so permits us to build a more empirically plausible picture of our agency. (shrink)

Según una influyente línea interpretativa, la mejor polis de Aristóteles debe ser considerada una politeia. Esta corriente predomina aún hoy entre los eruditos alemanes. En tanto paladina de la “social democracia aristotélica”, Martha Nussbaum pertenece también a esta línea exegética. En oposición a tales interpretaciones, este ensayo defiende la tesis de que Aristóteles pertenece a la tradición de pensamiento político aristocrático. Esta tradición se remonta a Teognis, Heráclito y Platón y se inicia como una crítica dirigida tanto a la decadencia (...) de la virtud aristocrática cuanto al ascenso de valores democráticos e igualitarios. Este trabajo demuestra que Aristóteles concibe las diferentes formas de constitución como manifestaciones de distintas concepciones de la justicia distributiva. Aristóteles mantiene una clara preferencia por una concepción aristocrática de la justicia, y, por tanto, por la aristocracia. La constitución de la mejor polis que detalla en los libros VII y VIII de la Política debe entenderse como una “verdadera aristocracia” en la que los cargos políticos son distribuidos según el mérito entre los ciudadanos que sean los mejores desde el punto de vista moral e intelectual. Palabras clave: Aristóteles, pensamiento político aristocrático, justicia distributiva, aristocracia, mejor polis. (shrink)

This study compares the Internet (corporate web pages) and annual reports as media of social responsibility disclosure (SRD) and analyses what influences disclosure. It examines SRD on the Internet by Portuguese listed companies in 2004 and compares the Internet and 2003 annual reports as disclosure media. The results are interpreted through the lens of a multi-theoretical framework. According to the framework adopted, companies disclose social responsibility information to present a socially responsible image so that they can legitimise their behaviours to (...) their stakeholder groups and influence the external perception of reputation. Results suggest that a theoretical framework combining legitimacy theory and a resource-based perspective provides an explanatory basis for SRD by Portuguese listed companies. (shrink)

This article summarizes and extends the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to libertarianism based on the moral costs of its current epistemic status, (3) an objection to the distinctiveness (...) of semicompatibilism against conventional forms of compatibilism and (4) whether moderate revisionism is committed to realism about moral responsibility. (shrink)