Against Abstraction (Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands‪)‬

DEEP INTO THIS wide-ranging collection, Michael Walzer, long an editor of Dissent and one of the leading philosophers of the Left, addresses the question of dirty hands in political action. His essay, first presented as a lecture in 1971, is eerily evocative of current debates over civil liberties and legitimate government interference. Walzer considers what should be done to a government official who takes some immoral action--torture, say--for reasons of state. After acknowledging that as a rule politicians are "a good deal worse, morally worse, than the rest of us," and that political power always implies the threat of violence, Walzer finds the dirty-hands question presents a paradox. Conventional wisdom holds that no one "succeeds in politics without getting his hands dirty.... For sometimes it is right to try to succeed, and then it must also be right to get one's hands dirty. But one's hands get dirty from doing what it is wrong to do. And how can it be wrong to do what is right?"