The experience of ‘moral distress’ is an increasing focal point of contemporary medical and bioethics literature, yet it has received little attention in discussions intersecting with ethical theory. This is unfortunate, as it seems that the peculiar phenomenon may well help us to better understand a number of issues bearing both practical and theoretical significance. In this article, I provide a robust psychological profile of moral distress in order to shed a newfound light upon the longstanding problem of ‘dirty hands’. (...) I argue that moral distress offers evidence of the existence of dirty hands situations. By examining moral distress and its relationship to cases of dirty hands, it appears that few of us are completely immune to susceptibility to these sorts of troubling experiences. With this concern in mind, I provide various recommendations to help alleviate our morally distressing personal and professional lives. (shrink)

The alleged problem of the dirty hands of politicians has been much discussed since Michael Walzer’s original piece (Walzer 1974). The discussion has concerned the precise nature of the problem or sought to dissolve the apparent paradox. However there has been little discussion of the putative complicity, and thus also dirtying of hands, of a democratic public that authorizes politicians to act in its name. This article outlines the sense in which politicians do get dirty hands and the degree to (...) which a democratic public may also get dirty hands. It separates the questions of secrecy, authorisation, and wrongfulness in order to spell out the extent of public complicity. Finally it addresses the ways in which those who do and those who do not acknowledge the problem of dirty hands erroneously discount or deny the problem of complicity by an appeal to the nature of democracy, a putatively essential need for political openness or to the scope of ideal theory. (shrink)