## 1. Introduction



Anthony Trollope's novel, *The Way We Live Now*, is a
biting critique of the corruption of late Victorian morals. One of its
central characters, the shallow Lady Carbury, at one point voices her
conviction that the praiseworthy deeds of the powerful escape the
normal categories of morality. Commenting on the character of the
novel's dominant figure, the grand swindler Melmotte, she says
to her journalist friend Mr. Booker:



> 
> 
> "If a thing can be made great and beneficent, a boon to
> humanity, simply by creating a belief in it, does not a man become a
> benefactor to his race by creating that belief?"
> 
> 
> 
> "At the expense of veracity?" suggested Mr. Booker.
> 
> 
> 
> "At the expense of anything?" rejoined Lady Carbury with
> energy. "One cannot measure such men by the ordinary
> rule."
> 
> 
> 
> "You would do evil to produce good?" asked Mr. Booker.
> 
> 
> 
> "I do not call it doing evil....You tell me this man may
> perhaps ruin hundreds, but then again he may create a new world in
> which millions will be rich and happy."
> 
> 
> 
> "You are an excellent casuist, Lady Carbury."
> 
> 
> 
> "I am an enthusiastic lover of beneficent audacity," said
> Lady Carbury...
> 
> 
> 



Contemporary moral and political philosophy suffers from no lack of
enthusiastic admirers of "beneficent audacity". At one end
of a spectrum are those consequentialists who are so captivated by the
prospect of the new world of "happy millions" that they
think it obscurantist to object to any evil means needed to achieve
it--indeed, they agree with Lady Carbury in not calling such
means evil. At the other end of that spectrum, stand the rather more
reluctant advocates of "dirty hands" who think that some
very good ends, such as the aversion of catastrophe, require the doing
of evil, but unlike Lady Carbury, they insist on calling it evil,
though necessary evil. And like Lady Carbury, they rather think that
the agents who so dirty their hands cannot be measured "by the
ordinary rule." Even so, like W.H. Auden in his poem
"Spain", they think such agents doing what current
circumstances make "necessary" should accept the guilt
that their immoral actions earn. As Auden puts it:



> 
> 
> "To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
>   
> 
> The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder."
> 
> 
> 



The dirty hands tradition dates back to Machiavelli, though its
present currency is largely owed to the American political theorist
Michael Walzer who gave it the title of dirty hands in an influential
article "Political Action: the Problem of Dirty Hands", in
which he coined the term "dirty hands" adapting it from
Jean Paul Sartre's play of the same name (Walzer 1973). Later,
Walzer used the idea, though not the term, in his book *Just and
Unjust Wars* (1977) in which he argued that an appeal to
"supreme emergency" could not only explain but justify the
Allied terror bombing of German cities in the early stages of World
War II (Walzer 1977a, 267-68). For these early stages, roughly
(it seems, for Walzer gives no date) up to the end of 1941, the
deliberate massacre of thousands of German non-combatants was required
by supreme emergency, even though it was gravely immoral. The prospect
and likelihood of a Nazi victory were so dire for the lives and
communal values of those facing defeat that the price of severe
immorality was worth paying. In the subsequent conduct of the war,
Walzer argued, the city bombings were simply immoral (as were the city
bombings of Japan, including the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki) and could not be justified by supreme
 emergency.[1]
 When Walzer later revisited the topic of supreme emergency, he made
it clear that it was a case of dirty hands, indeed he seems to have
come to the view that *only* something like the circumstances
of supreme emergency could provide a dirty hands justification. So he
says, in the later discussion of supreme emergency, that the doctrine
of dirty hands is that "according to which political and
military leaders may sometimes find themselves in situations where
they cannot avoid acting immorally, even when that means deliberately
killing the innocent." And again: "...dirty hands
aren't permissible (or necessary) when anything less than the
ongoingness of the community is at stake, or when the danger that we
face is anything less than communal death" (Walzer 2004a,
46).


## 2. Shifting Interpretations



The first thing to notice about this is that the identification of
supreme emergency and dirty hands represents a dramatic shift from
Walzer's view in his original article, and this shift reflects a
significant ambiguity in the dirty hands tradition. Walzer's
accounts of supreme emergency vary somewhat in the treatments in
*Just and Unjust Wars* and in the later article,
"Emergency Ethics" (and we shall attend to this later) but
in both accounts the necessity to override deep moral constraints only
arises in conditions approaching catastrophe. In the original 1973
paper, however, the trigger for dirty hands is nowhere near as
extreme. One example there, with intriguing contemporary relevance,
concerned a political leader's need to torture a suspected
terrorist in the hope of preventing the likely killing of hundreds of
innocent people. This falls well short of the criterion of supreme
emergency in Walzer's later writings where the trigger is the
devastation of whole peoples and/or their ways of life. Moreover,
Walzer's other example in the original paper was of a good
democratic politician bribing a corrupt ward boss to deliver him votes
with the promise of improperly delivered school construction
contracts. Here not only is the moral violation much less profound
than in the former case, but the emergency could hardly be considered
"supreme" in any sense even if we allow that the votes are
needed to win an important election and that the politician is
genuinely motivated to do good when elected. In Walzer's initial
treatment, there is also some ambiguity in the use of the term
"dirty hands" since he sometimes uses it for any
conspicuous immorality as well as the more interesting and technical
sense we are concerned with. So he says "It is easy to get
one's hands dirty in politics and it is often right to do
so" (Walzer 1973, 174). The first clause seems to point to the
widespread temptation to resort to immorality where the second
indicates that it isn't always right to do so, hence demarcating
a positive normative sense of "dirty" from a merely
descriptive sense. The use of "often" shows the more
concessive attitude to the scope of dirty hands in contrast to
Walzer's later view.



Earlier writers concerned with the need for politicians to dirty their
hands with immoral behaviour show some of this vacillation, sometimes
stressing the extreme stakes that are involved, but more often
appearing to view the political process generally as above morality,
or at least operating with a different morality. ("One cannot
measure such men by the ordinary rule"). John M. Parrish in an
interesting and far-ranging book (Parrish, 2007) shows that there are
elements of the concern about the generally challenging nature of
politics for morality as early as Plato's *Republic*.
Parrish's understanding, however, of what constitutes dirty
hands is often so broad as to obscure some of the distinctions,
ambiguities and problems arising from current philosophical
discussions. to be fair, he is interested in charting a sort of
pre-history to the contemporary debate, and admits that "the
problem may have changed over time" so that there is "a
succession of dirty hands problems" (Parrish, p. 18). Even so,
some of the apparently morally troubling examples he discusses from
ancient intellectual sources have none of the marks of the
contemporary problem. Augustine's insistence, for example, that
even a justly waged war is morally regrettable is accompanied by the
untroubled argument that the warrior whose cause and intention is just
does not sin at all (i.e., violate any moral obligation) in killing
his enemy. Parrish' emphasis on the idea that political life is
pervasively morally problematic, however, does find echoes in early
modern treatments that foreshadow the contemporary dirty hands
discussion. One such influential treatment is that of Machiavelli. So
Machiavelli thinks that the ordinary processes of politics require
that the Prince "must learn how not to be good", though he
should maintain the appearance of virtue and indeed behave virtuously
when the cost is low (Machiavelli 1513, 52). Max Weber stresses the
way that regard for consequences must dominate the thinking of the
politician as contrasted with ordinary or religiously inspired ethics.
This contrast lies behind the opposition Weber discerns in
"Politics as Vocation" between "an ethic of
responsibility" and "an ethic of ultimate ends".
Although the terms in which Weber frames the contrast tend to confuse
rather than clarify the issues, it is probable that one thing he has
in mind for the "ultimate ends" side of the conflict is an
ethic involving absolute prohibitions; he sees these as being in
tension with an outlook geared to counting consequences. As Weber puts
it: "there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows
the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends-that is, in religious terms,
'the Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the
Lord'-and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of
responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the
foreseeable results of one's action" (Weber 1919, 120).
The starkness of this contrast is one source of confusion since, as we
shall see later, absolutists are not totally indifferent to
consequences -- not all their ethic consists of absolute
prohibitions-and non-absolutists need not be obsessed only with
consequences. But Weber is adamant that it is impossible in politics
to adhere generally to any absolutist ethic of ultimate ends, largely
because of what he sees as the central role of violence in politics.
In spite of Walzer citing him approvingly (up to a point) in his
original article, Weber does not seem to hold anything like
Walzer's mature view. He does not think that an ethic of
ultimate ends suffices most of the time, but gives way in conditions
of supreme emergency; rather his view appears to be that the ultimate
ends ethic is quite generally inadequate to politics. In fact,
Weber's belief that violence is central to the operation of
politics is exaggerated, though understandable in the circumstances in
which he wrote, but if it were true it might give his position more
affinity with Walzer's idea of supreme emergency. The difference
would remain that, although violence may well be a factor in
establishing supreme emergency, Walzer's mature understanding of
supreme emergency requires more than simply incursions of
violence.



This ambiguity about the extent of the need for dirty hands is
reflected in much of the literature on the topic. Numerous writers
have followed early Walzer (and some elements in both
Machiavelli's and Weber's treatment of political morality)
in regarding politics as a zone in which, to quote Neil Levy,
"dirty actions are part and parcel of ordinary political
life". Levy adds: "Politicians must make deals, compromise
with interests they abhor, distribute favours and neglect
relationships" (Levy 2007, 52-3, endnote 26). A number of
these things are no doubt regrettable or distasteful in varying
degrees, but whether they are immoral depends on what the deals are,
what the favours involve, how deep the compromise runs, and how
damaging the neglect is (and to what sort of relationship). Much of
what various writers regard as the need for dirty hands in politics is
dubiously an issue of immorality at all. In order to maintain power
and get important work done, a politician may have to appoint a member
of a party in coalition with his own to an important Ministry ahead of
a trusted colleague in his own party who has better credentials for
the job. This is disappointing and painful to him and his colleague
and clearly less than ideal (even though the appointee is, we may
suppose, competent enough) but I do not think the act can be seen as
immoral. To call it morally disagreeable is to signal the fact that
certain valuable relations and ends are put under strain by it, but it
is clearly not is the same league as torture, murder, or gross
deceit.



Bernard Williams does indeed distinguish levels of gravity in the
sinning required of politicians in his exploration of the scope of
dirty hands, but he also suggests that the politician's
necessary immoralities are very common and distinctive. He
distinguishes between the morally "disagreeable or
distasteful" and the morally criminal, the latter being subsumed
under a broad category of what he calls "violence"
(Williams 1978, 71). Although Williams allows that some political
actions that are popularly believed to be morally dubious, may well be
morally acceptable when circumstances are properly understood, he
casts a pretty wide net for the morally disagreeable. It involves such
things as "lying, or at least concealment and the making of
misleading statements; breaking promises; special pleading; temporary
coalition with the distasteful; sacrifice of the interests of worthy
persons to those of unworthy persons; and (at least if in a
sufficiently important position) coercion up to blackmail"
(Williams 1978, 59). Yet it is unlikely that all of these, as so
generally described, are morally wrong in all circumstances. True,
some philosophers have held as much for some of these--Augustine,
Aquinas and Kant for lying, and Kant for promising--but surely
lying is acceptable in extreme circumstances such as the need to
protect an innocent person from a murderer, and even coercion
(depending on the definition) isn't always morally wrong,
witness the coercive detention of people reasonably suspected of
contagious disease that they are unaware of. It seems that most, if
not all the things Williams mentions are in the category
"normally morally wrong but morally permissible in certain
circumstances". Even blackmail might be in this category since
blackmailing a vicious criminal in order to secure the freedom of his
victim might (perhaps depending on the kind of blackmail) be morally
permissible. Notions like regret or remorse are sometimes invoked to
show that what had to be done was nonetheless immoral, but apart from
the fact that an act such as the blackmail of a vicious criminal need
not even be regrettable, there are many things one can rightly regret
having to do that are not immoral, for example, punishing a child by
withdrawing privileges. Remorse strikes a stronger, more moralised
note, but for that very reason one should be careful not to confuse it
with various feelings of discomfort, regret or sorrow for having to do
certain things. Further investigation of the nature and appropriate
conditions for remorse is interesting and difficult, but beyond the
scope of this discussion, and its role as a criterion of dirty hands
seems at best inconclusive.



The idea that dirty hands (in contrast to sheer bad behaviour and
corrupt activity) are commonplace in politics is highly dubious, but
just how extensive the reach of this phenomenon is in politics is
difficult to determine, and would be best considered on a case by
case, or perhaps category by category, fashion. Clearly, the most
obvious, and I think the most interesting category is that described
by Williams with the term "violence" (though that has the
contentious, and I think unfortunate implication that all violence is
immoral). This covers the acts that Walzer's later argument
seeks to capture with his term "supreme emergency". His
terminology and his later practice make the scope of dirty hands
pretty restricted, perhaps more so than Williams intended, but I will
follow his example and focus on really grave injustices like murder,
torture, rape or slavery that are said to be warranted in conditions
of extreme emergency.



First, however, it is worth noting that enthusiasm to detect the sway
of dirty hands can lead to misdescription of some complex, disturbing
moral situations. An interesting example of this has been explored by
Jennifer Rubenstein in connection with problems facing International
NGOs providing aid in emergency situations such as the refugee camps
in the Congo. INGO agents have found that their provision of food and
medicine is often exploited by warring factions within refugee camps
and elsewhere (see also some of Fiona Terry's discussion and
examples in Terry 2002). This confronts them with often agonising
decisions about whether to cease aid and leave the areas of distress
because of the harm this exploitation generates, including
continuation of violent conflict. If they leave they abandon suffering
people, but if they stay, then they contribute unintentionally to
great harms that others inflict on innocent people. Such problems are
often described with the vocabulary of "dirty hands", but,
as Rubenstein argues, this description is misplaced since, for one
thing, the aid agencies do not themselves intentionally do harm to
avoid some great evil or achieve some great good. Rubenstein proposes
a category of "spattered hands" to describe these
situations in order to emphasise that the soiling is contributed by
the actions of others (Rubenstein 2014, Chapter 4). We cannot examine
the adequacy of her new category here, but she seems right that the
examples are misdescribed as dirty hands.



It will be apparent from all this that the dirty hands problem needs
initially some conceptual clarification; this should proceed with a
view to five issues. First, there is the question whether the dirty
hands scenario makes any sense at all; perhaps it is just a muddle.
Second, there is the related question whether the overriding that
dirty hands involve (or purport to involve) takes place within
morality or somehow beyond it. Third, there is the question whether
dirty hands are necessitated only or primarily by politics. Fourth,
how are the circumstances that call for dirty hands best described?
Fifth, there is the issue of the relation of the dirty hands problem
to that of moral dilemmas and the requirements of some form of moral
absolutism.


## 3. A Conceptual Confusion?



Let us examine these in turn. The structure of dirty hands is such
that it seems to involve a contradiction or paradox. The advocate of
dirty hands says in effect that it is sometimes right to do what is
wrong, and this seems tantamount to saying that some act is both wrong
and not wrong. But the dirty hands theorist is not saying that it is
wrong in some respects and right in others, nor that what would
normally be wrong is here right. Rather, it is the whole act in
context that is both categorically wrong and not wrong. In the dirty
hands scenario we are asked to believe that doing *X* is
morally wrong and yet it is palpably right to do it. As Walzer has
more recently written of his own position, it is both
"provocative and paradoxical" (Walzer 2004a, 33). Kai
Nielson has urged the point even more strongly, but something of the
sort has puzzled many who contemplate the problem. The category of
dirty hands, as described by Walzer and some others is, according to
Nielson "a conceptual confusion with unfortunate moral
residues" (Nielson 2000, 140). Clearly such a dismissal would
come naturally to a utilitarian or most consequentialists who would
simply declare the dirty hands decision to be one in which a right act
(that producing the best consequences in terms of preference
satisfactions, overall increase in happiness or whatever) has been
done though it may have been distressing to do it. Nielson disavows
utilitarianism and calls himself a "weak consequentialist"
but the upshot is much the same. He thinks that dirty hands situations
confront an agent with a choice of two evils and the agent should
always choose the lesser evil. No doubt, in acting against what in
other circumstances is a deep moral constraint, the agent will
experience distress; she will "feel guilty" but feeling
guilty is not to be confused with being guilty (Nielson 2000,
140).



From the opposite direction the problem can also be resolved by the
denial that the hands should become dirty. An insistence on the
inviolability of some moral prescriptions makes the paradox disappear
as neatly as the Nielson manoeuvre. If we hold to the prohibition on
intentionally killing the innocent, for example, in the face of crises
like that supposed by Walzer to necessitate the bombing of German
cities in the early phase of World War II, then there are no dirty
hands to have. Such a position is often called absolutist. Absolutist
positions have been explicitly held by many philosophers, notably
Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant, and implicitly perhaps by many more. The
position involves complexities that we will examine later.



Both these responses agree in holding that moral reasons rightly
dominate all others. Another way of defusing the strong appearance of
contradiction is to hold that morality is not the only legitimate
determinant of right action and that some other determinant may
occasionally properly trump it. This provides one answer to the second
point of clarification mentioned earlier. Dirty hands problems do not
arise *within* morality but rather when morality clashes with
some other rational necessity of a profound kind that correctly
overrules
 it.[2]
 The overruling must inspire regret, possibly remorse, but it is
nonetheless clear that the overruling is in order, indeed required.
Here, it is important to acknowledge that the overruling in question
is not merely a description of what often happens. It is common
knowledge that the demands of morality are often enough overridden by
other persuasive demands, such as imperatives of self-interest,
careerism, political advantage and friendship. It may even be that
politics is an arena in which such overpowering happens more commonly
than elsewhere, so that participation in it is fraught with moral
hazard that requires an exceptional moral character to overcome.
Nonetheless, the importance and challenge of the dirty hands scenario
is not that hands get dirty from time to time, but that it is right
that they do so.



If we allow that non-moral "oughts" can sometimes trump
moral ones then the dirty hands position may be restated as holding
that, in circumstances of extremity, reasons of
"necessity" (or whatever) defeat important moral reasons.
This seems to be one plausible construal of Machiavelli when he talks
of the necessity that rulers must learn how not to be good. Of course,
he has the model of Christian morality in mind when he calls for its
overriding and so may be understood as opposing one form of morality
to another, but a good deal of his discussion can be treated as
elevating "reasons of state" above morality. This is a
rejection of the idea that moral reasons dominate all other
reasons.



It may be useful here to distinguish between dominance and
comprehensiveness. Most moral theorists hold that morality is both
comprehensive and dominant, that is, it relevant to all decisions and
where relevant it defeats all other reasons. One could however hold
that morality is comprehensive but not dominant, or dominant but not
comprehensive, or indeed neither dominant nor comprehensive. Our
present inquiry is concerned with the first two options. The ideas of
dominance and comprehensiveness express somewhat different pictures of
the status of morality, though an exalted understanding of morality
often draws on both. Morality's dominance would consist in its
trumping all other considerations whenever it is relevant to them,
whereas morality's comprehensiveness consists in its being
universally relevant whether it trumps other considerations or not. On
the present interpretation, dirty hands theorists accept
morality's comprehensiveness (at least with respect to the
domains they are concerned with) but reluctantly reject its dominance
for one class of decisions.



We might usefully contrast this with the position of the school of
thinkers called "political realists" whose outlook has
some affinity with the dirty hands theorists to the point that the two
are sometimes confused. Realists are often viewed (and often present
themselves) as rejecting the comprehensive relevance of morality by
reference to something special about politics or international
relations. So we find E.H. Carr stating as "the realist
view" that "no ethical standards are applicable to
relations between states..." (Carr 1962, 153). Other
realists come close to this, though their views are clouded by
uncertainties about morality's provenance (as indeed are
Carr's). Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for instance, claims:
"The raw material of foreign affairs is, most of the time,
morally neutral or ambiguous. In consequence, for the great majority
of foreign-policy transactions, moral principles cannot be
decisive" (Schlesinger 1971, 73).The influential American
realist, Hans Morgenthau, is anxious to separate politics from
morality by maintaining "the autonomy of the political
sphere." He recognises the autonomy of other spheres such as
economics, law and morality, but insists that the political realist
must "subordinate these other standards to those of
politics" (Morgenthau 2006, 13). Here, he echoes the position of
the German conservative thinker Carl Schmitt by whom he was clearly
influenced. Schmitt became embroiled with the Nazi Party in the 1930s
and enjoyed (if that is the word) some fame for a time as a
theoretician for the Nazi cause. These quotations all suggest the idea
that politics, or some significant area of it, such as international
relations, falls quite outside the provenance of morality, thus
denying morality comprehensiveness, though the reference to
morality's failure to be "decisive" hints at a
denial of dominance. There are many obscurities in the stance of
political realism, and this is not the place to unravel them, but in
spite of the ambiguities in pronouncements of the leading theorists in
the school, and in spite of some continuity between their outlook on
politics and that of the dirty hands theorists, it is clear that the
realist's attitude to morality usually has quite a different
flavour to that of the dirty hands
 theorists.[3]
 Part of this is captured by the difference between the denials of
comprehensiveness and dominance, and this connects with the fact that
when realists reject moral considerations they do so with no deep
sense of regret or remorse for having done what is morally wrong.



The denial of dominance preserves a certain coherence for morality
since it is not, as it were, at odds with itself; it is at times and
in context at odds with something else which, following both
Machiavelli and Walzer, might be called "necessity". But
what is this necessity? Clearly, it is not meant to be some form of
deterministic necessity, since it would have been possible for the
British leadership in World War II to have rejected the policy of city
bombing outright, as their declared policy prior to the war had
indicated they would do, a policy that their initial bombing practices
indeed
 respected.[4]
 Yet there is a trace of this deterministic thought in the idea of
supreme emergency with its implication of something that overwhelms
the normal power of morality. We might recall in this connection
Thomas Hobbes's argument that moral dictates cannot apply when
they would lead to self-destruction. Hobbes's idea is that the
rationality of self-preservation, which itself gives rise to morality,
makes acting on morality null and void when acting on it would defy
self-preservation. As Hobbes puts it: "The laws of nature oblige
*in foro interno*; that is to say, they bind to a desire that
they should take place: but *in foro externo*: this is to the
putting of them in act, not always. For he that should be modest, and
tractable, and perform all he promises, in such time, and place, where
no man else should do so, should but make himself a prey to others,
and procure his own certain ruin, contrary to the ground of all laws
of nature, which tend to nature's preservation"
(Leviathan, Ch. XV, p. 99).



Hobbes certainly does paint a totally isolated scenario for the person
who would obey the moral law--"where no man else should do
so"--and one might wonder whether the institution of
promising could even exist in so bleakly uncooperative "time and
place" as he supposes. But presumably a sufficient number of
non-cooperators would serve to make one "a prey to others"
and procure "certain ruin", and it is the necessity of
avoiding some such ruin that motivates the supreme emergency story,
even though it is collective rather than individual ruin that lies at
its heart. Hobbes's exemption from the need to practice morality
(rather than desire its operation) makes most sense on a contractarian
view of morality or in connection with those moral obligations that
are dependent upon agreement (even if other obligations are not). In a
world in which hardly anyone kept their promises or adhered to their
contracts, the sense of such commitments would dissipate and entering
into what shell remained of them might be folly indeed, and very
likely futile as well. But many other areas of morality are not like
this, and so even where adherence to moral imperatives may be perilous
in the extreme, it may not be the folly that Hobbes's comments
make it seem. One woman who survived Belsen, Hanna Levy-Haas, records
in her diary a philosophical debate she had in the camp with a fellow
Marxist, Professor K who argued the somewhat Hobbesian case
(embellished with Marxist terminology) that morality did not apply in
the camps because it was superseded by the survival imperative. She
rejected his argument because it required her "simply to
compromise with the enemy, to betray one's principles, to deny
spiritual values in the interests of saving one's skin"
(Levy-Haas 1982, 65). These comments indicate at the very least that
the idea of "total ruin" is open to interpretations that
see the abandonment or degrading of moral integrity as itself a
primary ingredient in such ruin.



This excursion into the world of the Leviathan nonetheless helps give
some sense to the idea that the practice of morality might be
suspended for a time and hence morality itself moved aside by an
external necessity. It thus helps show a way that the dirty hands
story might be redeemed from incoherence, even if the idea that
morality should sometimes be dominated by an external necessity proves
unacceptable. The dirty hands position might then be coherent but
false. So Hanna Levy-Haas could understand the Professor's
argument, but found reason to reject it.


## 4. A Conflict Within Morality?



Another route out of paradox would be to hold that the clash depicted
by dirty hands theorists occurs within morality. Here, the idea might
be that morality itself is not entirely coherent or self-consistent.
In certain extreme circumstances, one powerful strand in morality
comes into conflict with another. Even more clearly, Weber's
distinction between the ethics of ultimate ends and that of
responsibility points in this direction. His idea is expressed
somewhat opaquely, but he seems to be claiming that there are two
strands in morality, or two types of morality, such that one may be
applicable to ordinary life, but must yield to the other in matters
political, especially those that involve difficult choices in a
context of violence. Several passages in Walzer's discussion
tend in this direction. He holds that a morality of rights and a
morality of consequences or utility co-exist in our moral outlook in
such a way that although rights trump utility in normal circumstances,
a "utilitarianism of extremity" rightly overrides the
morality of rights in some rare circumstances. As he puts it: in a
situation of supreme emergency, "a certain kind of
utilitarianism reimposes itself", this being "the
utilitarianism of extremity" set against "a rights
normality" (Walzer 2004a, 40).



This contrast between a rights ethic (or other deontological ethic)
and utilitarianism is one way of locating the clash within morality
itself. Another way is by having recourse to role morality: within
morality itself there are general moral principles, rules etc. and
then special moral requirements dictated by significant social roles.
These can come into conflict, as when the lawyer's obligation to
provide her client with the best defence and to preserve
confidentiality can conflict with the demands of impartial justice. So
it might be argued that the political role has obligations and rights
special to it that override more general moral obligations and rights.
When it comes to the immensely important role of political leadership,
we "cannot measure such men by the ordinary rule" as Lady
Carbury puts it. This manoeuvre has the advantage of capturing
something important in the dirty hands literature (and it is also
present in the realist literature), namely, the emphasis on the
special moral significance of the role of political leadership.
Walzer, for instance, places great weight upon "what political
leaders are for." Talking of political and military leaders, he
says, "The effect of the supreme emergency arguments should be
to reinforce professional ethics, and to provide an account of when it
is permissible (and necessary) to get our hands dirty" (Walzer
2004a, 42). An initial problem with this sort of move is that the
special duties and rights of social roles are underpinned by general
moral considerations since it is only those roles that can be morally
supported by quite general moral considerations that will have a role
morality. We may describe the code of the Mafia thug as the morality
of his role, but usually it is mores rather morality being described.
Even if it is a requirement of his role that a Mafia hit-man must
murder anyone who snitches to the police, this is hardly a moral
imperative of any sort. And where there are genuine moral duties to a
role, and they are endorsed by broader moral considerations, we do not
believe that this endorsement cannot itself be overruled by other
general moral obligations. The requirements of professional
confidentiality, for instance, can be so overridden, as when medical
confidentiality regarding a doctor-patient communication stands in the
way of saving a life. The famous Tarasof case is instructive in this
respect. It concerned a counsellor at the University of California at
Berkeley who learned from his client that he planned to kill his
ex-girl friend. The counsellor was sufficiently worried that he broke
confidentiality to tell the police who investigated but took no
further action. The girl friend (Tarasof) was duly murdered by the
client, and a court later held that the counsellor should have gone
further and notified Tarasof or her family of the
 danger.[5]
 Other courts have been less demanding, but there is a general
recognition that the professional duty of client confidentiality can
be overridden by more pressing moral demands.



Indeed, the structure of the role morality defence of the dirty hands
story provides a curious inversion of the role morality logic since
that logic requires that emergency situations allow or even demand the
overturning of the role duties by the more general demands of a deeper
morality. By contrast, the dirty hands scenario requires the role
morality to triumph over the deeper moral outlook that gives sense to
the morality of role itself. Here we find yet another paradox
generated by the dirty hands category. It could only be resolved by
the insistence that the political role is unique among roles since in
its case its moral power somehow transcends the general morality. (Or,
if the dirty hands scenario applies beyond the political, it will be
one of a small set of roles that is unique.) In fact, there is a
strong strand of this political exceptionism inherent in the dirty
hands story. Yet how could the political role have such a status? We
might expect such an exaltation of the role from one such as Schmitt,
but in fact Walzer himself is drawn to it. Walzer's position has
been cited as treating the dirty hands conflict as involving a clash
between a rights ethic and a utilitarianism of extremity, but the
following quote puts his position much more in the role morality
arena. He says in his later treatment: "No government can put
the life of the community and all its members at risk, so long as
there are actions available to it, even immoral actions, that would
avoid or reduce the risk....That is what political leaders are
for; that is their first task" (Walzer 2004a, 42). Furthermore,
the significance of this task is cashed out in terms of the supreme
value of the specific "moral community" to which the
political leader belongs. The leader's obligations will involve
calculations of utility, but, in extremis, his or her ultimate
responsibility to that community trumps universalist utilitarian
calculations as well as specific deontological constraints. When the
"ongoingness" of a community's way of life is
threatened then the prospect is that of "a loss greater than any
that can be imagined, except for the destruction of humanity
itself" (Walzer 2004a, 43). These claims, if true, would
certainly establish a pre-eminent, if not unique, significance for the
political role, so they need close examination.



Walzer's two quotes stress significantly different values that
he has a tendency to conflate. The first is that of life itself for
all members of the community, the second that of the continuity of a
"way of life". Survival is at issue in both cases but the
significance and weight that each survival should have is surely very
different. The prospect of universal massacre understandably puts
stress upon anything constraining the scope of actions to prevent it,
but the prospect of forced alterations, set-backs or radical changes
to a way of life must be less threatening. Even a relatively benign
foreign occupation may involve extensive and very regrettable changes
to the way of life of the occupied community perhaps in the form of
restrictions on traditional freedoms, such as those of political
speech or religious expression, and a degraded position of citizenship
vis-a-vis the occupiers. Yet throughout history modified life
styles have evolved for such communities that make for the possibility
of at least coping and even some flourishing. It is not at all obvious
that slaughtering innocent people is justified in order to avoid such
an outcome, or even outcomes notably worse on the same scale.



Even if dirty hands were permitted only to political communities
facing extreme situations, it is not at all clear that the exemption
should only be available to political communities that have states.
Walzer does not exactly say this, but his pro-state bias is evident in
his discussion of supreme emergency in *Just and Unjust Wars*.
Early in that discussion, he says, for instance, "Can soldiers
and statesmen override the rights of innocent people for the sake of
their own political community? I am inclined to answer this question
affirmatively, though not without hesitation and worry" (Walzer
1977, 254). Further, in a different essay on terrorism, Walzer rejects
arguments on behalf of terrorism by non-state agents that are very
similar to those that he accepts as legitimating the bombing of German
cities. For example, he claims that the familiar terrorist excuse that
they had no alternative in the face of oppression is only "a
pretence." As he puts it: "'Last resort' has
only a notional finality; the resort to terror is ideologically last,
not last in an actual series of actions, just last for the sake of the
excuse" (Walzer 2004b, 54). Yet no such scepticism is expressed
about the no alternative and last resort justifications offered by
governments who use terrorism in supreme emergency.



But political communities other than states may surely face supreme
emergencies, even allowing for the difficulties in interpreting the
concept, so the way is open in principle for sub-state terrorism to be
justified. This is a position that Walzer somewhat reluctantly seems
now (in a parenthesis to a later reprinting of the terrorism article)
to concede, though it goes somewhat against the grain of the article
itself. The parenthetical comments, published in 2004, are:
"Would terrorism be justified in a 'supreme
emergency' as that condition is described [by Walzer in the
earlier chapter called 'Emergency Ethics']. It might be,
but only if the oppression to which the terrorists claimed to be
responding was genocidal in character" (Walzer 2004b, 54). There
are difficulties in matching the complex meanings of
"genocide" to Walzer's communitarian account of
supreme emergency. For one thing, a Nazi victory would probably not
have meant genocide for the British community yet, according to
Walzer, they were facing supreme emergency. So, the sources of his
differential treatment of state and sub-state terrorism remain a
puzzle.



He goes on to deny that any actual recent terrorism has been "a
means for avoiding disaster" rather than merely a
"reaching for political success" (Walzer 2004b, 54). So
the supreme emergency/dirty hands exemption seems available, given
significant qualifications concerning probability of success, for
terrorists aiming to save a communal way of life. In a later paper
again, Walzer allows for exceptional cases in which sub-state
terrorism might be excusable though not justifiable; he imagines as
excusable "a terrorist campaign by Jewish militants against
German civilians in the 1940s--if attacks on civilians had been
likely (in fact they would have been highly unlikely) to stop the mass
murder of the Jews" (Walzer 2006, 7). The shift from justifiable
in the earlier quotation to excusable in the later clearly needs more
explanation; Walzer seems hesitant, if not confused in his resort to
these categories. Nonetheless, on Walzer's own grounds, there
would seem to be a case, given some likelihood of success, for the
employment of terrorism by Palestinian groups seeking to salvage what
remains of their community's way of life from the ravages of
Israeli occupation, settlement and military attack. It is perhaps
pertinent to this prospect that the Palestinians refer to their
dispossession and ongoing sufferings at the hands of Israel as
"al-Nakba": the catastrophe. No doubt, their achieving
that prospect would involve some sort of "reaching for political
success" but this hardly counts against its status as a response
to supreme emergency. The point here is not to make any particular
claims about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but rather to stress
the idea, noted earlier, that Walzer's move to a criterion of
genocide is puzzling as the sole interpretation of what a threat to
the continuity of a communal way of life could mean.



Walzer's tendency to run together the categories of excuse and
justification needs some comment because it is symptomatic of the
tensions inherent in the dirty hands scenario. He realises in the 1973
article that it is important to distinguish them. Citing J.L. Austin,
Walzer remarks that "the two can seem to come very close
together...but they are conceptually distinct...an excuse is
typically an admission of fault; a justification is typically a denial
of fault and an assertion of innocence" (Walzer 1973, 170;
Walzer 1974, 72). Yet dirty hands acts involve both an admission of
fault and a justification. This tends to collapse the distinction
since what is justified needs no excuse and the unjustifiable is
sometimes excusable. Walzer's discussion for the most part
clearly treats the dirty hands decisions as justified in some sense,
whatever is said about its role as excuse. It is notable that at least
one commentator, Tamar Meisels, explicitly rejects the account in
terms of justification in her discussion of terrorism and torture but
she accepts dirty hands as providing grounds for excuse (Meisels
2008a, 213-221). Yet not only is this an unlikely interpretation
of the tradition, but it renders the category of dirty hands far less
interesting philosophically and ethically.



The discussion of the importance and extent of political community
leads naturally to the question whether the need for dirty hands can
be restricted to the political sphere. If hands must be dirtied to
avoid widespread massacre, on the one hand, or damage to the
moral-cum-political continuity of a community's way of life,
then why not to avoid the unjustified killing of individuals or small
groups or the drastic disruption of individual or small group's
way of living. Why should the political community and the political
role take such dramatic precedence over such significant groups as
families and their associated roles? For that matter, why should it
take precedence over the individual's need for survival
regardless of role? The answer to this is not entirely clear. In
Walzer's discussion of supreme emergency and the World War II
city bombings, he confronts this question but his discussion is marked
by what he himself calls "hesitation and worry". It is
also marked by appeals to what people are "likely to
feel", "what is not usually said" and similar
phrases. He says: "...it is not usually said of individuals
in domestic society that they necessarily will or that they morally
can strike out at innocent people, even in the supreme emergency of
self-defense. They can only attack their attackers. But communities,
in emergencies, seem to have different and larger prerogatives. I am
not sure that I can account for the difference, without ascribing to
communal life a kind of transcendence that I don't believe it to
have" (Walzer 1977, 254). Nor, he thinks, can it simply be a
matter of the numbers. Yet he persists with the superiority of the
political community: "We might better say that it is possible to
live in a world where individuals are sometimes murdered, but a world
where entire peoples are enslaved or massacred is literally
unbearable. For the survival and freedom of political
communities--whose members share a way of life, developed by
their ancestors, to be passed on to their children--are the
highest values of international society" (Walzer 1977, 254).
Leaving aside the quibble that an individual facing murder won't
find it possible to live on if she is actually murdered when perhaps
she refuses to kill the innocent in order to survive, we might
question the sensitivity of ignoring the way any murder victim's
close relatives find her death unbearable and the prospect of living
on an agonising one. We might also wonder why "we"
don't find it unbearable to slaughter hundreds of thousands of
innocent people to preserve the survival and freedom of our political
communities. Nor is the reference to "the highest values of
international society" particularly compelling. Where
"international society" refers to the society of states,
as Walzer seems often to mean, then it is not surprising that such
states hold their survival as a pre-eminent value, but non-state
agents may understandably have different priorities. A mother
scrounging for the survival of her children in the desperate
conditions of a third-world slum or primitive refugee camp may just as
plausibly see herself coming under what Walzer calls, in connection
with political communities, "the rule of necessity (and
necessity knows no rules)" (Walzer 1977, 254).


## 5. The Scope of Dirty Hands and Some Significant Distinctions



In his original article on dirty hands, Walzer allows in passing that
the phenomenon he is exploring might have a place beyond politics. So,
he says: "I don't want to argue that it is only a
political dilemma. No doubt we can get our hands dirty in private life
also, and sometimes, no doubt, we should. But the issue is posed most
dramatically in politics..." (Walzer 1974, 76). This
concession has, however, little influence on his developed position
which is focused wholly on extreme emergency in political contexts.
(The original article is, after all, called, "Political Action:
the Problem of Dirty Hands".) Other writers have been puzzled by
the heavy concentration on politics. Michael Stocker, for one, rejects
this restriction (Stocker 2000, 32-3). Stocker also argues that
the dirty hands phenomena, though distinctive in various ways, exhibit
quite common features of moral conflicts more generally, and partly
for this reason he thinks there is no logical incoherence in the dirty
hands story. Stocker argues that what he calls double-counting, i.e.,
giving moral weight to impossible oughts, and allowing for
non-action-guiding act evaluations, is a central feature of dirty
hands, but is not restricted to them since they occur "across
the board" of moral thinking and deciding.



However it should be located, the phenomenon of dirty hands can be
easily assimilated to that of moral dilemma, but this is an
assimilation that should be resisted. Someone confronted with a
supreme emergency is indeed in what is often colloquially called
"a moral dilemma" in the sense that she faces a disturbing
and difficult choice situation, but that does not make it a moral
dilemma in a philosophically interesting sense. In common parlance all
sorts of situations that cause initial uncertainty and require hard
moral thinking to sort out are called moral dilemmas, as philosophers
who teach or consult on business ethics are fully aware. This usage is
harmless enough, but the philosophical usage of the term points to a
more disturbing situation and one that needs to be distinguished from
dirty hands. Both the categories of dirty hands and moral dilemma
involve agonising choice in which there will be grave moral loss
either way. The most salient difference between the categories is that
a moral dilemma arises only when the choice is such that neither horn
is decisively supported by morality, indeed morality speaks equally
against both. (There is a parallel dilemma for non-moral normative
contexts, if there be any, where normative reasons speak equally
against doing *p* or doing not-*p*.) Whichever way the
agent chooses, her action is unjustified and there is no question of
one course being more necessary or demanded than the other. By
contrast, the dirty hands choice is always dictated as the
"necessary" course: in the context of political
emergencies, the community defence always wins the day even over
innocent lives. This is the special feature that marks off dirty hands
from moral dilemmas.



A relatively unexplored question concerns whether anything more
informative than a reference to "emergency", supreme or
otherwise, can be provided to illuminate the typical circumstances in
which it is claimed that hands must be dirtied. One line of
clarification that might be attempted would be to scrutinise more
carefully various broad situations in which moral action might be
especially under strain in political contexts. A first suggestion
might be that politics is essentially a zone of compromise, and it is
the pressure of compromise that creates the need for dirty hands. It
is certainly true that compromise is a pervasive feature of political
life, but compromise is hardly unique to politics, nor is it
necessarily a pressure for immoral conduct. Indeed, it is arguable
that the capacity to compromise is an essential moral ingredient in
all successful cooperative endeavours, since, apart from its
instrumental value, it shows respect for other reasonable participants
in public action. Nonetheless, compromise clearly has its morally
dangerous side as indicated by our use of "compromised" to
characterise someone whose principles have been sullied to an extent
that makes them untrustworthy. Since a compromise is a sort of bargain
where parties sacrifice some good objectives in order to gain others,
it raises a question about how far such deals can go, and this brings
us into dirty hands territory. Another situation, related to our
earlier discussion of Hobbes, is that of moral isolation. As noted
there, the fact that general adherence to morality has to a
considerable degree broken down, might not give as great a
dispensation from moral constraints as Hobbes supposes, but at least
it poses starkly the rationale for compliance. A third situation that
seems relevant here and needs further exploration is that of
extrication. Politicians, and others, often find themselves in
situations where they have inherited, or are otherwise constrained by,
the decisions and policies of others (or even their previous selves)
that they now judge unwise or even gravely immoral. So, for example,
they may seek to end an unjust war to which their predecessors have
committed the nation, but immediate cessation and withdrawal may not
be desirable from several perspectives, including a moral point of
view. They may very well think that the best extrication strategy
requires a temporary continuation of the war, unjust as it is, with a
view to a withdrawal that better secures the rights of innocent people
and makes the withdrawal politically possible. Obviously, what such
situations might allow in terms of continued immorality needs to be
spelled out in more detail than space allows here, but equally, it
seems clear that there is a potential for dirty hands discussion that
moves fruitfully beyond the often-vague generalities of
"emergency" or "extremity".



Some recent discussions that are relevant to dirty hands problems are
concerned with what Cecile Fabre has called "second best"
moral justifications. In her book on the ethics of spying she argues
that although spying activities can involve acts generally considered
as morally wrong, such as blackmail, unwanted covert surveillance, and
even treachery or treason, a resort to acts such as these can be
morally justified in some contexts of gathering intelligence in a just
cause. She qualifies this, however, in various ways including
disqualifying such resorts when the cause for which the spying is
undertaken is unjust. So, when discussing espionage activities by a
nation and its agents to discover important secrets of another nation
that they have unjust designs upon, such as waging an immoral war, she
firmly denies such a nation the right to use those activities. If, for
example, a nation *A* is planning an unjust war against
nation *B* it would be morally unjustified in spying on a
suspected cyber facility of *B*'s with a view to
destroying it, even if the facility is likely to be used
against *A* (either as a pre-emption or in a later
retaliation). Yet even here, *A* may be "second
best" morally justified, indeed even have a moral duty, in
undertaking such spying where it might lead to discovering that the
facility is a civilian one and morally should not be targeted. That
*A*'s spying reveals the facility to be civilian and
thus *A* refrains from attacking it is a sort of moral plus in
its overall dark moral position in the matter. Fabre insists,
therefore, that this second best moral justification allows *A*
to proceed but leaves a "moral taint"
on *A*'s action since it shouldn't be undertaking
spying on Green at all in pursuit of an unjust intervention. This
moral taint is a clear echo of the dirty hands story. 



Another discussion with such an echo occurs in Tadros 2020, which
endorses participating in a war that you know to be unjust in order to
ensure that the war is fought with greater restraint (p. 55). Tadros
makes no mention of "moral taint" and may see the choice
as morally straightforward if unusual. It seems possible, however, to
see it as involving dirty hands and the "moral taint" of
participating in an unjust war, even for achieving some amelioration
of the injustice. Either way, a difficulty with the position is that
it's hard to see how an individual enlisting in such a war could
seriously imagine that they could have such an effect in a way that is
remotely proportional to the extensive moral violations their
involvement requires them to commit or condone, especially given the
highly authoritarian structures of armed forces. Those structures mean
that the individual would be under regular extreme pressure to kill
enemy soldiers he has no moral right to harm, as well as the highly
likely possibility of similar pressure to kill enemy civilians either
directly or indirectly. Of course, the story might be different if the
individual were conscripted to fight in an unjust war and made the
second best of it by doing what they could to minimise the harms they,
and others, did. This could also come under the heading of extrication
morality if they also aimed to extricate themselves by, for instance,
seeking opportunities to desert.



The discussion of extrication raises another point about dirty hands
that is seldom addressed. Dirty Hands scenarios are often constructed
very specifically as giving the agent narrow choices restricted by
external circumstances over which she has no present control. The
specific scenario is often then generalised as though those external
circumstances, or ones very like them, are immutable for an agent with
that sort of background (e.g., a politician). This is, however,, too
static and inflexible a view of moral contexts, roles and agent
capacities. In the extrication story discussed earlier, the
politician's "necessary immorality" is forced upon
her by the circumstances she has created or inherited, but the point
of invoking extrication morality within the dirty hands problematic is
to insist on possibilities of temporary involvement in evil and the
need to change the circumstances that require such involvement. The
ruler bent on extrication must persist in waging an unjust war only
because at that time there is no other way that she can end the war by
changing the context. But this restriction should be seen here and in
other dirty hands situations as creating a moral imperative for the
agent or others to change the background against which the moral
crisis has arisen so that similar situations are unlikely to recur. In
the unjust war example, the politician might use eventual success in
ending the war to change colonial or neo-colonial policies that fed
the resort to war, to remove over-belligerent personnel from the
defence establishment, rethink alliances that played a part in
promoting the unjust war, and so on. Courage, imagination and luck may
be needed to realise the relevant possibilities, but without making
efforts at relevant changes, the agent's appeal to necessity
when invoking the dirty hands plea should ring hollow.


## 6. The Dirty Hands of Citizens



Most of the discussion of dirty hands concentrates upon the situation
of the individual political leader who must dirty his or her hands,
but another interesting question concerns the dirt on the hands of
citizens themselves when their leaders act thus on their behalf. This
is particularly acute for democratic citizens to whom representative
theory applies more plausibly than to citizens of an autocracy. In
Walzer's original discussion, he insists that part of the
tension, even agony, of the dirty hands problem arises from the fact
that we, the governed, want our leaders to be virtuous, but also want
them to have the sort of character that can act against deep moral
principle when the supreme emergency arises. Of the politician who
dirties his hands in a good cause but realises he is acting immorally,
Walzer writes: "Because he has scruples of this sort we know him
to be a good man. But we...hope that he will overcome his
scruples...We know he is doing right when he makes the deal
because he knows he is doing wrong" (Walzer 1973, 166; 1974,
68). But if so, our endorsement would seem to have some implication
for our own hands. This is not an implication that Walzer fully
explores, though he does say in the last sentence of his original
article when discussing the need to penalise dirty hands that we
can't punish the dirty hands of the principal agents
"without getting our own hands dirty, and then we must find some
way of paying the price ourselves" (Walzer 1973, 180; 1974,
82).



Various other writers have however explored the implication, either
directly or as part of the discussion of the supposed need to
"punish" dirty hands (for this topic see below). Most
recently David Archard complains that "...there has been
little discussion of the putative complicity, and thus also dirtying
of hands, of a democratic public that authorizes politicians to act in
its name" (Archard 2013, 777). Here he echoes an earlier
position taken by Martin Hollis and also similar claims made by Dennis
Thompson. As Hollis puts it: "Political actors, duly appointed
within a legitimate state, have an authority deriving finally from the
People. Currently that means from you and me.... When their hands
get dirty, so do ours" (Hollis 1996, 146-7). Like Walzer
they assume that somehow the ruled require the rulers to dirty their
hands, and this opens the way to distribute some degree of
responsibility or "dirt" to them.



Taking Walzer's claim first, it is not at all obvious that
"we" want or hope that our leaders will violate deep moral
prohibitions where they judge it necessary to achieve important
political ends or avoid very bad outcomes, even if they remain
conscious of their wrongdoing. No doubt some of us do and some of us
don't, but the issue is not really one of counting the
preponderance of desire in the community; it is rather whether there
is something inherent in the relation of the democratic citizenry to
its leadership that authorizes the leaders to dirty their hands in the
relevant way. Archard explicitly argues for such an authorization,
claiming that it is this authorization that gives the citizens a share
in the taint of dirty hands. Hollis, Dennis Thompson, Neil Levy and
Janna Thompson rely upon some similar link.



But what exactly is this the nature of this authorization? It must be
more than simply giving certain people the authority to govern on our
behalf since that seems compatible with implicit or explicit
restrictions upon what they can or cannot do. Clearly, Archard needs
some strengthening of what the authorization allows; he tries to
achieve this by using the idea of a division of labor. Specifically,
he argues that there is a both a political and a moral division of
labor (Archard 2013, 782). The political is relatively
uncontroversial: it is the thesis that efficiency is best served by
the legitimate, multiple tasks required in a community being divided
and the task of governing is one of them. This makes no further
normative claims about restrictions or entitlements related to the
exercise of those tasks, and is compatible with most forms of
government. The moral division asserts that the different roles in
society carry with them different moral prerogatives and duties
appropriate to the different roles. But whatever the merits of such
role morality, it is not clear that it permits rulers to do anything
at all that they believe will fulfill the purposes of their role.
Combining the idea of role with that of authorization cannot show that
the authorized role player is entitled to use whatever means he or she
judges the only effective way of achieving the role's purposes.
If it did, then authorizing a debt collector would seem to imply that
the agent may torture the debtor if that is the only way to collect a
significant debt.



It might be conceded that this is ludicrous in the debt-collecting
example, but that the political role is different because of the very
high stakes, not only for the politicians, but for the democratic
citizens. Yet we have already seen that it is hard to contain the
dirty hands story within the realm of the political, and very few
political decisions are momentous enough to give politics a status
sufficiently privileged to exempt its practitioners, through that
role, from those deep moral constraints that restrict the
debt-collector or other agents in non-political life. Indeed,
consciousness of these facts helps explain why Walzer has
progressively tightened the conditions in which dirty hands apply. So
the question about authorization must focus on whether
"we" can plausibly be said to have authorized violations
of deep moral principle in supreme emergency situations. Dennis
Thompson insists we do when he says that the dirty hands politician
acts "not only for us, but with our consent--not only in
our name but on our principles" (Thompson 1987, 18).



This confident answer to the question is not however supported by
argument or even survey, and seems to assume unanimity amongst the
"we" of a pluralistic, democratic community that is
unlikely to obtain. Dennis Thompson relies upon the legitimacy of the
democratic process and citizens' assent to its outcomes, but,
aside from any general problems with consent theory, the ruler's
dirty hands acts are often enough illegal or unconstitutional, as in
the case of torture, or in violation of declared policies that got the
ruler elected. Moreover, what we want of our political leaders will
presumably depend upon who "we" are and what moral and
political principles "we" hold. Suppose a dirty hands
decision has been made by the leaders to torture an innocent child in
order to extract information from the child's radical parent
about a "ticking bomb" (and suppose that this is a genuine
dirty hands decision and not one flawed by lack of knowledge or
ignoring of preferable alternatives) then it is plausible to hold that
those citizens who think that the moral politician should violate his
(and their) deep moral objections to torture in such circumstances
must share in the guilt or shame that should attach to the politician.
But there will surely be many citizens who either think that the moral
violation should not have occurred, even in these circumstances, or
who think that the prohibition is not as deep as commonly supposed and
hence that the politician's decision is right but not immoral.
It is implausible to hold that both these groups are implicated in
dirty hands in the way Archard and others suggest that all democratic
citizens, merely by being citizens, are.



Moreover there is a further question underlying the question of
consent or authorization or expectation, namely that concerning what
we ought to want, expect or authorize and what principles we ought to
have. This is the question whether politicians ought to get their
hands dirty, in any sense of "ought" that carries ultimate
weight. If the politicians are right (in certain, presumably extreme,
circumstances) to dirty their hands and they are right to do it on our
behalf, then at least those of us who agree that it is right are
involved in what they do and have some responsibility for it. Indeed,
we are more than tainted, we are complicit.



Emphasizing the shared guilt of citizens has implications for a
further issue, concerned with how the dirty hands perpetrator should
be treated after the event. Walzer argues that the politician's
genuine guilt means that she should suffer a penalty or a shaming for
having done what "we" want her to do (Walzer 1973,
177-8; 1974 79-80). Others have taken a similar line
though the position has been criticized by, for example, Tamar Meisels
and Neil Levy (Meisels 2008a, 227 and Levy 2007 throughout). There are
serious problems about moral responsibility in claiming that a dirty
hands agent who does what is morally wrong because he must should be
punished or publicly disgraced. After all, if the freedom to act is a
precondition of moral responsibility and therefore blame, then the
dirty hand agent who does what is (all-things-considered) necessary
and somehow right seems immune to the criticism involved in blame.
(For further elaboration of this and related objections see Levy 2007;
also Meisels 2008a, 226-27.) The point here, however, is that,
even if it is proper to blame and shame for dirty hands, then, on the
supposition that all citizens share in the taint, selecting only one
to shame seems distinctly unjust, indeed massively hypocritical. While
the rest of us rejoice and celebrate the happy consequences of our
agent's necessary misdeed, she is shunned or worse. As already
noticed, Walzer does think that punishing the dirty hands conduct of
the principal agents makes our own hands dirty (though he
doesn't seem to think that our original authorization of the
conduct does this). He doesn't elaborate the point, but it opens
up intriguing prospects since presumably we dirty "our"
hands in punishing these agents precisely because, in some sense, they
are "innocent" or at least do not deserve punishment
because they have acted "rightly". This opens up bizarre
possibilities of regress since "we" now should have to pay
a further price for inflicting a price on ourselves when we have done
the right (but immoral) thing in punishing ourselves, and so on and
on. It seems the spreading of responsibility for dirty hands to the
governed community merely adds to worries about the coherence of the
concept.



Claims of shared guilt or taint raise further questions about the
responsibility that democratic citizens as well as their leadership
have for remedying the evil done to the victims of the dirty hands
decision. Stephen de Wijze (de Wijze, 2018) argues that not only must
the leadership try to justify their decision to their constituents,
but they and all their democratic citizens are liable to make
restitution to victims for the "necessary" harm done by
the dirty hands decision. Admittedly, he thinks that that although the
citizens are complicit their "moral pollution" is
generally less than the leadership. Even so, they are obliged to make
amends to the victims of the decision. All citizens, he argues, even
those dissenting from the decision, must "share in the moral
burden, and contribute to the appropriate restitution" (de
Wijze, 2018, 144). So they must pay "some penalty" perhaps
in the form to increased taxation to effect reparations.



The claim that all democratic citizens are so obliged needs some
unpacking since there is clearly a difference in liability for those
who enthusiastically supported or were indifferent to the dirty hands
tactic and those who opposed it. There is some plausibility in the
claim that even strongly dissenting democratic citizens incur some
restorative and other moral obligations as a result of their
leaders' dirty hands behaviour, but support for this claim need
not resort to dubious extensions of the idea of collective guilt or
moral taint. Membership in a democratic political community (or even
in some non-democratic ones) creates a set of relationships that
involve forms of identification such that a degree of pride can be
taken in good decisions by the leadership and by fellow citizens and a
degree of shame or alienation at bad ones. None of this means that the
dissenting citizen is in any way morally responsible for those
decisions, but what it may mean is that the dissenting citizen has
some special moral responsibility to criticise those decisions,
including the dirty hands ones that she rejects, and to do what is
possible, in spite of her lack of pollution or guilt, to repair the
bad effects. Responsibility for bad acts should be distinguished from
responsibility to remedy or compensate for them, though it is a
complex matter how to sketch the lineaments of this distinction.


## 7. The Issue of Absolutism



Both dirty hands and moral dilemmas challenge the idea that some moral
prohibitions or negative duties are "absolute" though they
do so in different ways. If we deny that there are moral rules or
prohibitions that stand whatever the context, then it will not be
surprising that deep moral prohibitions may be legitimately overridden
in some circumstances. Indeed, many contemporary moral theories, other
than utilitarianism, insist that such overruling remains a permanent
possibility. The intuitionism of W.D. Ross and his followers, for
instance, insists that all duties and obligations are prima facie. It
is always possible that the prima facie duty not to kill the innocent
will clash with some other prima facie duty, such as the duty to
promote wellbeing or the ruler's duty to preserve the state or
protect the community, and then one's actual duty will be the
outcome of weighing the respective force of the clashing prima facie
duties. One might thus see the dirty hands story as merely a version
of this outlook, a version that insists that only a very great
weighting on the other side of the balance can tip the scales against
some very significant prima facie obligations. Using terminology of
Thomas Nagel's, dirty hands would instantiate "threshold
deontology" with a very high threshold for certain action types.
To make this assimilation would be to take much of the sting out of
the dirty hands story, both because dirty hands would be part of a
more commonplace moral perspective rather than a quite special ethic
for emergencies, and because there seems to be no room in threshold
deontology, or what has been called "balanced
exceptionism" (Coady 2004, 778-9; Coady 2008, 285-7,
299). for the idea that one has done wrong in doing what is
nonetheless right. There may be a sense of regret that one cannot
avoid doing something that was prima facie wrong--it would be
more comfortable if one's prima facie duties did not conflict
and therefore need resolution--but no wrong can be attributed to
you if you have done the balancing
 conscientiously.[6]
 The balanced exceptionist can of course acknowledge that some prima
facie duties are stronger than others, and hence some presumptive
wrongs carry more heft than others. Indeed, the balancing story
commits its supporters to this acknowledgement since there would be no
point to the talk of balancing as a procedure for decision unless
there were such differences of weight. But the fact remains that the
granting of exemption from the prohibition on intentionally killing
the innocent is part of a normal, even routine, business of balancing
presumptive obligations in order to find what is finally obligatory or
prohibited. If the scales tell you that it is morally permitted or
even morally obligatory intentionally to kill the innocent, then in
these circumstances it cannot be wrong to do
 so.[7]



In fact, there is an interesting comparison here with utilitarianism.
As we have seen, it is common to contrast balanced exceptionism or
threshold deontology with utilitarianism and to establish dirty hands
as a form of deontology (or intrinsicalism) that yields to the
utilitarianism of extremity. But there may be room for a utilitarian
version of the threshold story, even possibly the dirty hands story.
Surely a sophisticated version of utilitarianism, such as rule or
indirect utilitarianism, can have room for the idea that duties,
virtues etc. cannot be overridden by ordinary calculations of utility
since to allow this would be to risk too much overall disutility. It
is only in situations of dire or "supreme" emergency that
the disutility of abiding by the prohibitions or rules would be great
enough to override the utilitarian value of keeping to the
 rule.[8]
 So, depending upon the empirical facts and calculations, a
utilitarian can admit a role for thresholds, supreme emergencies, and
even dirty hands. But while this might give us a utilitarian version
of threshold deontology, it will not do as a version of dirty hands,
since the utilitarian overriding at the supreme emergency stage will
involve a decision that is simply right, and not in any sense right
but still wrong. The only sense in which it remains wrong is that weak
sense, akin to that attributed to Ross in endnote 35, in which it
would have been wrong but for the supreme emergency. For the
utilitarian, (as indeed for Ross) there is no real moral remainder,
though there may be some room for psychological discomfort.



The moral remainder and the remorse it generates signals the tribute
that dirty hands pays to moral absolutism. While actually rejecting
moral absolutes, the dirty hands theorist remains entranced by the
significance they give to certain moral constraints. But how do we
decide whether moral absolutism should be rejected? It is difficult in
the nature of the case to see what could resolve a dispute between
absolutists and non-absolutists. Absolutists do not typically regard
all moral prohibitions as absolute; they restrict their claim to a few
such prohibitions, such as those against intentional killing of the
innocent, rape and (for some theorists) torture. Their opponents claim
that, even for these cases, emergency scenarios can be imagined in
which "our" intuitions accept the legitimacy of such acts.
Where absolutists don't reject the scenarios as merely fantastic
(as some certainly are), they simply have different intuitions about
the force of the examples. Moreover, they can point out that most
moral theorists, including their opponents, are absolutists about some
moral issues. Utilitarians allow no exceptions "whatever the
circumstances" to their basic rule of maximising satisfactory
outcomes, Rawlsian contractualism gives an absolute priority to
certain principles of liberty, and similar points apply to other
theories normally opposed to absolutism. It might be replied that the
level at which absolutism applies is different, and this is true since
the absolutist endorses specific moral prohibitions such as that on
murder or torture whereas the other theories are usually absolute at a
more abstract level. Yet it is unclear why this is an important
difference, or why, if it is, it should count against the absolutist.
After all, it is surely plausible that our conviction that murder or
torture is always wrong has more authority than any conviction that we
should always maximise the greatest happiness of the greatest number
or always maximise preference satisfaction. Moreover, some specific
moral prohibitions seem proof against even fantastic counter-examples,
e.g., the principle that it is wrong to torture an innocent child for
fun. But, even here, it may be hazardous to underestimate the
ingenuity of philosophers in constructing bizarre counter-examples.
Clearly, more remains to be said about the nature of a defensible (or
objectionable) absolutism, but our discussion at least serves to
indicate the significance of absolute prohibitions for the framing of
dirty hands scenarios.



A further interesting issue about absolutism is its common association
with some versions of religious ethics, especially the
Judeo-Christian. Certainly, there seems to be a strong element of it
in traditional Catholic moral theology, and Elizabeth Anscombe, who
was a committed Catholic of a theologically conservative cast of mind,
wrote an influential article (1958) which was, *inter alia*, an
early contemporary defence of absolutism against the balanced
exceptionism of much (she thought all) of the then current moral
philosophy. Anscombe tied the notion of moral obligation in the use of
"ought" and "ought not" to the concept of
Divine Law the increased unfashionability of appeal to the commands of
which in connection with obligation having palpably diminished outside
religious circles (Anscombe 1958). Even within those circles,
however, there are problems with a Divine Command ethic as an
endorsement of absolutism. One can be illustrated through the Biblical
story of Abraham's response to God's command that he
should kill and sacrifice to God his son Isaac. In the Akedah, as the
tale is often named, Abraham complies until a messenger from God stays
his hand at the last moment. Since the intentional killing of an
innocent child is a prime example of the absolutely forbidden for
Anscombe and others there is an obvious incompatibility between a
divine command ethic in general and this particular command from God
that Abraham is so ready to obey. Exegetes have had various
explanations of Abraham's situation and this is not the place to
explore them, other than to point to the primary difficulty of
God's commanding Abraham to to form and begin to put into action
the intention to murder his child.



It is noteworthy that at least one Catholic scholar Evan Sandsmark has
argued forcefully that the rejection of dirty hands, implicit and
explicit the Catholic theological absolutist moral tradition is
mistaken, and moreover acceptance of the dirty hands category is
consistent with absolutism, and even requires it, thereby reinforcing
the relevance of my earlier point about the tribute that dirty hands
pays to absolutism. His argument is that the moral taint that is
essential to the dirty hands act of necessity is best explained by its
involving a guilty violation of an absolute prohibition. Since the
prohibition remains absolute though the violator has by hypothesis
done the right thing then the agent must be remorseful and seek
penance and appropriate recompense for the offence. Sandsmark's
ingenious argument strains the sense of the term
"absolute" since some sort of "necessity"
makes the prohibition no longer absolutely binding, bringing it nearer
to Igor Primoratz's "almost absolute" category in
connection with the prohibition of terrorist acts of intentionally
killing the innocent (Primoratz, 2013, 110-113). It also seems
to inherit the problem discussed earlier in this entry about
separating the overwhelming dirty hands necessity from morality only
at the possible cost of achieving coherence at the cost of
falsity. 



Walzer's attitude to absolutism is (as it has to be) one of
respectful rejection. He says: "I don't believe that
terrorism can ever be justified. But I also don't want to defend
an absolute ban. 'Do justice though the heavens fall' has
never seemed to me a plausible moral position" (Walzer 2006, 7).
Elsewhere, he says, after claiming that absolutism is "very old,
perhaps older than anything else in our moral understanding",
that at the point of disaster or supreme emergency "absolutism
represents, it seems to me, a refusal to think about what it means for
the heavens to fall" (Walzer 2004a). Such a refusal can indeed
be represented as obtuse, but when we come to cash out contemporary
thinking about falling heavens we might think about the issue of
torture, an issue that was one of Walzer's earliest examples
generating dirty hands. The easy acceptance since September 11, 2001,
amongst some intellectuals of the recourse to torture in situations of
emergency, frequently it would seem far short of
"supreme", has raised questions of the relevance of
absolutism even on the part of those who had previously endorsed dirty
hands or exceptionism of some sort. So, Henry Shue, for instance,
always a strong opponent of torture, had nonetheless allowed in his
original treatment of the issue that torture might be morally
permissible in certain "extreme" circumstances (Shue
1977-78). But in a later, Shue criticises his own admission and
the widespread intellectual acceptance of torture in extremis as a
resort to "dreamland" (Shue 2006). By this he means that
the philosophers' stories about "ticking bomb"
scenarios are basically fantasies that distract from the reality of
moral assessment in the real world. Shue's opposition is now, as
a matter of practice, resolute and absolute. Others have also
expressed a commitment to a sort of absolutism in connection with
torture. Bob Brecher, for example, provides a criticism of the ticking
bomb scenario (which is basically the scenario Walzer uses in his
original paper on dirty hands) and from a purely consequentialist
perspective endorses the need for an absolute condemnation of torture
(Brecker 2007). As mentioned earlier, Igor Primoratz somewhat
similarly recognises the pull of absolutism about some moral
imperatives and argues for "almost absolute." So the
debate about torture largely engendered by the "war on
terror" has revived interest in the credentials of moral
absolutism, although much about the nature and types of absolutism
remain in need of clarification. In any event, there is clearly reason
to approach the topic of dirty hands with a degree of suspicion
regarding Lady Carbury's enthusiasm for "beneficent
audacity" and her contempt for measuring exceptional people by
the "ordinary rule" appropriate to the rest of us.