The Different Sources of Dirty Hands: Episodes, Rules, and Careers

A recurring methodological mistake within the ‘dirty hands’ literature, the view that politicians must sometimes justifiably commit real moral wrongs, has been to assume that only a specific kind of choice structure creates the space for justifiable dirtying. Instead, I argue that the circumstances that justify political dirt are not monolithic and identify three separate ways in which dirtying conduct can become all-things-considered justifiable. Dirty Episodes cover instances of delineable episodic decisions that inflict dirt, and where such dirtying behaviour is justifiable as a lesser evil–I also argue that ‘ticking-bomb’ cases that usually serve this function in philosophy should be decentred. Dirty Careers covers the quotidian moral dirt demanded by politics as a career (without necessarily demanding an entirely separate political normativity). Dirty Rules concerns the contingent structural factors and ‘terms of the competition’ that undesirably demand or legitimise dirtying behaviour from political agents.