Michael Walzer’s foundational essay on dirty hands raises the very possibility of a good person in politics. Dilemmas in the context of high stakes situations sometimes require politicians to compromise their morality and character for the sake of the greater good by choosing the lesser evil. Much has been written about dirty hands, but little has been said about Walzer’s implicit virtue ethics. This essay sketches this implicit virtue ethics, which is central to Walzer’s argument. These are “dirty” virtues, however, (...) that allow one to choose the lesser evil in a dilemma while recognizing that, although evil was mitigated, and some degree of good achieved, wrong done is still wrong done. For this to work, Walzer argues the politician must be and feel guilty, making this an odd virtue ethics that requires a degree of suffering from the politician. The essay further develops this notion of dirty virtue through comparison with Lisa Tessman’s “burdened virtue,” arguing at the end that the guilt and instrumental suffering, which are so central to Walzer’s virtue ethic, may be more corrosive to practical reasoning and character than Walzer allows for. (shrink)

In a landmark essay, Andreas Matthias claimed that current developments in autonomous, artificially intelligent systems are creating a so-called responsibility gap, which is allegedly ever-widening and stands to undermine both the moral and legal frameworks of our society. But how severe is the threat posed by emerging technologies? In fact, a great number of authors have indicated that the fear is thoroughly instilled. The most pessimistic are calling for a drastic scaling-back or complete moratorium on AI systems, while the optimists (...) aim to show that the gap can be bridged nonetheless. Contrary to both camps, I argue against the prevailing assumption that there is a technology-based responsibility gap. I show how moral responsibility is a dynamic and flexible process, one that can effectively encompass emerging technological entities. (shrink)

Traditional articulations of the conception of dirty hands, as the doing of wrong in order to do right, invite construals of the issues raised thereby as mired in conceptual confusions and inconsistencies, and moreover as generating unproductive discussions of the scope of the proposed notion itself. The status of the concept of dirty hands is thus precarious, in spite of its provenance in the work of political thinkers such as Machiavelli. This essay articulates one nonparadoxical conception of dirty hands, as (...) the uncomfortable phenomenology of agents authorized to act on behalf of others, when they are called upon to do things that, while morally correct, are also personally or morally distasteful. The key point is that the dirt of action remains on these agents’ hands, even if moral responsibility for the relevant actions should be conceived as falling on the persons in whose name they take the said action. This articulation opens up for investigation questions about the phenomenology of authorized agency, as well as the moral labor involved in leadership and in other contexts of authorized distasteful action. These are questions of social ontology. Here there is important philosophical work that remains to be done. (shrink)

This chapter introduces the Special Issue and offers an overview of the corpus of work on the topic since the publication of Michael Walzer’s seminal article, ‘Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands’.

A number of recent authors have argued for the problem of ‘democratic dirty hands’. At least within a democracy, public officers can be rightly said to act in the name of the public; and thus, as agents to principals, the dirty hands of public officers are, ultimately attributable to that public. Even more troubling, so the argument goes, since dirty hands are necessary for public officers in any stable political order, then such democratic dirty hands are necessary for any stable (...) democracy. Our dirt is the unavoidable cost of democratic survival.In this paper, I offer an argument against this disconcerting conclusion. My central claim is that proponents of ‘democratic dirty hands’ have missed the import of another feature of contemporary governance: public institutions. Public institutions, as organisational agents, intermediate the relationship between public officer and public; and in so doing, the dirt necessary for stability may be ‘laundered’: the public may still gain the benefit of a public officer’s hands, but remain clean of the dirt. I illustrate this case by an extended discussion of the case of La Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (‘CICIG’). (shrink)

Commenting on Michael Walzer’s essay, the author adopts a perspective that traces back to Machiavelli. In this view, ‘dirty hands’ is a true problem faced by politicians, not a philosophical fiction or a moral quandary resulting from wrong reasoning. ‘Dirty hands’ results from the collision of two spheres of human action -morality and politics- which entail different duties; it concerns actions which have extremely serious public consequences and therefore applies eminently to politicians and the public sphere. The author examines different (...) scenarios to elicit a clear view of the specificity of this problem, which is not analogous to the conventional issue of immorality in politics. ‘Dirty hands’ is a problem that cannot be avoided by politicians, because they have responsibility over the ultimate decisions; it follows that people who wish not to dirty their hands should thus refrain from entering the political realm. (shrink)

Many liberal egalitarians support laws that prevent people from making exploitative and unconscionable contracts. These contracts may include low-wage labor agreements or payday loans, for example. I argue that liberal egalitarians should rethink their support for laws that limit the freedom to make these illiberal contracts, as long as the contracts are voluntary and do not violate people’s other enforceable rights. Paternalistic considerations cannot justify limits on illiberal contracts because they are not only likely to misfire; they also express condescending (...) and inegalitarian judgments of citizens. I then consider Seana Shiffrin’s argument that officials may avoid paternalism while still deterring illiberal contracts if they instead refuse to use public institutions to accommodate contracts that are contrary to the fundamental values on which those institutions are based. This argument encounters a dilemma. Officials may refuse to enforce illiberal contracts and ban private enforcement of illiberal contracts, but this strategy encounters the charges of paternalism it aimed to avoid. Or, officials may refuse to enforce illiberal contracts but tolerate private enforcement, but this approach would make the worst off members of society even more vulnerable and marginalized. Therefore, liberal egalitarians should support public enforcement of illiberal contracts because the alternatives are worse. (shrink)

This paper outlines and explores the problem of democratic dirty hands, the sui generis moral situation where democratic politicians justifiably violate both a cherished moral principle and the fundamental processes of democratic governance. Some recent contributions to the dirty-hands debate have argued that the principles of democratic governance render DDH impossible. The paper rejects this view as based on a misunderstanding of the minimal and necessary conditions for both DH and democratic overnance. However, DDH does raise interesting issues concerning the (...) complicity of citizens with their politicians’ DH. Citizens are accessories to such acts and have a duty to contribute to the reparations for the victims of DDH. Furthermore, as citizens bear some responsibility for the moral violations that were done in their name, they properly ought to feel some of the moral pollution that these actions generated. (shrink)

This article discusses gift authorship, the practice where co-authorship is awarded to a person who has not contributed significantly to the study. From an ethical point of view, gift authorship raises concerns about desert, fairness, honesty and transparency, and its prevalence in research is rightly considered a serious ethical concern. We argue that even though misuse of authorship is always bad, there are instances where accepting requests of gift authorship may nevertheless be the right thing to do. More specifically, we (...) propose that researchers may find themselves in a situation much similar to the problem of dirty hands, which has been frequently discussed in political philosophy and applied ethics. The problem of dirty hands is relevant to what we call hostage authorship, where the researchers include undeserving authors unwillingly, and only because they find it unavoidable in order to accomplish a morally important research goal. (shrink)