‘It is necessary to a Prince to learn how not to be good’. This quotation from Machiavelli’s The Prince has become the mantra of the standard dirty hands thesis. Despite its infamy, it features proudly in most conventional expositions of the dirty hands problem, including Michael Walzer’s original analysis. In this paper, I wish to cast a doubt as to whether the standard conception of the problem of DH—the recognition that, in certain inescapable and tragic circumstances an innocent course of (...) action is unfeasible—fully captures Machiavelli’s message and its terrifying implications. In particular, I argue that the standard DH thesis is inadequately ‘static’: it conceives the conflict between ordinary morality and political morality as a stark, momentary and rare paradox of action—an anomaly disrupting the normality of harmony. As such it misconceives both the extent and the nature of the rupture between morality and politics. In this sense, the argument I shall advance does just involve an exercise in the history of political thought. Rather, I want to suggest that, by virtue of its failure to take Machiavelli’s insights seriously, the standard DH thesis fails to live up to its purported capacity to capture the complexity and fragmentation of our moral cosmos and that, consequently, it is nothing more than a thinly veiled version of the idealism and monism it purports to reject. (shrink)

Theodore Sider has argued that while there are some philosophical debates about which there is no fact of the matter, debates in normative ethics are likely not among them. This essay investigates a possible counterexample: the debate about so-called dirty hands. The essay first surveys several cases where No-Fact-of-the-Matter (NFM) claims have been made. Taking its cue from these cases, it then outlines two strategies that factualists about some domain can take, as well as two non-factualist counter strategies. Next, it (...) shows how an NFM claim can be defended for the debate about dirty hands. Finally, it argues that this NFM claim is at least as, if not more, plausible for normative ethics as it is for the other instances where NFM claims have been made. (shrink)

H.L.A. Hart’s lost and found essay ‘Discretion’ has provided new insight into the issue of how legal systems can cope with indeterminacy in the law. The so-called ‘open texture’ of law calls for the exercise of judicial discretion, which, I argue, renders judges susceptible to the problem of dirty hands. To show this, I frame the problem as being open to an array of appropriate emotional responses, namely, various senses of guilt. With these responses in mind, I revise an example (...) from Michael Walzer’s original analysis in a way that highlights purely personal sacrifices in solutions to dirty hands situations. I then turn to an account of moral emotions in legal decision-making and show how judges—in failing to advance all interests—might be left with a unique sense of guilt. With an application of this account to Hart’s legal positivism, it can be seen that a judge’s hands are often dirtied in resolving borderline cases. If discretion leaves judges in situations where they must do wrong in order to do right, Hart’s endorsement of a closure view of wrongdoing will lead to difficulties in how he can explain the presence of moral remainders in jurisprudence. (shrink)