Abstract
‘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 (DH) thesis. Despite its infamy, it features proudly in most conventional expositions of the dirty hands (DH) 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.
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Notes
Several DH theorists suggest that Walzer’s (1973) original conception of DH is too narrow: they argue that, like Machiavelli, Walzer unsatisfactorily restricts DH to politicians; whilst politics is somehow special, the DH dilemma might be confronted by non-political agents and might involve a tragic dilemma within morality (Gowans 2001; Stocker 2000; Shugarman 2000a, b; Coady 2008, 2009). In connection to this, I should first highlight that I do not wish to deny the possibility or the philosophical coherence of tragic dilemmas in ordinary life. My focus is different. I contend that because politics is somehow special as DH theorists seem to acknowledge, Walzer’s orthodox conception of DH in politics does not suffice. Second, whilst such theorists take issue with Walzer’s restriction of DH to politics, they overlook crucial conceptual differences between Walzer’s and Machiavelli’s thought. They also take for granted the validity of Walzer’s account in politics (despite its narrowness). Hence, the broader accounts of DH which emerge from their critiques tend to be, in terms of their conceptual structure, Walzerian still. It is this conceptual structure, I argue, which, from Machiavelli’s standpoint, is unsatisfactorily idealistic in certain ongoing practices, most notably politics.
This point, which I elaborate on later on, is recently defended by de Wijze (2012).
To be clear, it is not just the scenarios DH theorists discuss that are ‘static’. Rather, these scenarios are symptoms and indications of the problem I register here: DH theorists unsatisfactorily conceive the conflict between morality and politics as a surmountable anomaly.
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Acknowledgments
I am extremely grateful to Derek Edyvane and Kerri Woods for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. An early draft of this paper was presented at the workshop On Vice: Political Ethics and Moral Conflict hosted by The University of Leeds in association with the White Rose Association of Political Philosophy. I would like to thank the participants of the workshop, in particular Sue Mendus, John Horton and Cecile Hatier, for their encouragement and helpful comments. Moreover, I am indebted to the University of Leeds for supporting my research with two PhD scholarships. I would also like to thank the editors of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (ETMP) and two anonymous referees for their fruitful feedback on how to improve this essay.
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Tillyris, D. ‘Learning How Not to Be Good’: Machiavelli and the Standard Dirty Hands Thesis. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 61–74 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9508-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9508-x