Abstract

Questions about dirty hands have often focused on legitimate, secure leaders deciding whether to violate important deontological principles or the rules of interpersonal morality. The purpose of this paper is to show that revolutionaries have dirty hands; revolutionaries do wrong by engaging in unilateral usurpation of the existing system with the hope that latter benefits will justify their actions. Yet, once the revolution securely generates improvements for the common good, the initial usurpation becomes increasingly irrelevant to judgments of the new government’s legitimacy. The paper argues that only retroactive justification—where later success forces opponents and advocates to reinterpret the wrongness of the initial action—can fully capture the complex moral dynamics of revolutions.