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Notes
See (Plato 1994: 414a–e) where he introduces the notion of a ‘noble lie’.
These are the ‘Integrated Self’, ‘Identity’, and ‘Clean Hands’ pictures (Calhoun 1995: 235–260).
In fact, Mendus (ch. 3) examines whether utilitarian reasoning in itself undermines integrity and concludes, following Bernard Williams and Michael Walzer, that it doesn’t so much undermine as render incoherent and incomprehensible any talk of the value of integrity in politics. For example, a consistent utilitarian would not be able to explain why she ought to feel regretful or guilty or ashamed of certain immoral means needed to achieve worthwhile ends. Here political integrity is not so much undermined as rendered unintelligible.
These are moralism of (1) scope, (2) unbalanced focus (3) imposition or interference (4) abstraction (5) absolutism, and (6) deluded power (17).
I mean by a ‘complex of immorality’ a situation where there is no morally cost-free course of action. All possible actions, and indeed failures to act, carry significant moral costs that must be recognised, understood and accepted by agents.
Coady actually does recognise that the dirty hands account is more sensitive ‘to the horror of what must be done by the conscientious ruler’ and that his ‘balanced exceptionalism’, which acknowledges regret or compunction rather than guilt, is ‘too bland’. However it is not clear from the discussion which follows whether Coady thinks this blandness is necessarily a bad thing. He admits that much depends on whether we can find an alternative ‘mechanism’ to replace the ‘insistence that the agent has really done wrong in doing right’ (83) which properly reflects our intuitive and authentic responses when a deeply held moral prohibition is violated.
Walzer (1973: 167) describes his ticking bomb scenario as follows. A politician ‘is asked to authorize the torture of a captured rebel leader who knows or probably knows the location of a number of bombs hidden in apartment buildings around the city, set to go off within the next twenty-four hours. He orders the man tortured, convinced that he must do so for the sake of the people who might otherwise die in the explosions-even though he believes that torture is wrong, indeed abominable, not just sometimes, but always’.
In an earlier article, when examining Walzer’s account of dirty hands, Mendus declares that ‘There is no sense in the thought “morally wrong but morally justifiable”’ (Mendus 1988: 340) and also that ‘…the metaphor of dirty hands, of filth and blood, is extravagant to the point of hysteria’ (Mendus 1988: 341).
Mendus refers to the German word eschreckend (loosely translated as horrifying, alarming, or disturbing) used by Berlin to explain his disquiet with Machiavelli’s pluralist claim that there can be more than one set of values and that in some circumstances they may be in conflict (79). It seems appropriate to use this term to describe Mendus’s and Coady’s alarm at the very possibility that we could have a situation where we can do wrong in order to do right.
Politics in a pluralist democratic society probably would grind to a stop if no one ever lied or dissembled. (This is probably true of all human social interaction.) And it is not certain that even if it were possible to have a form of politics where no lies were told that this might be a better system than one which accepts a certain level of lying. (Coady does offer a brief account of when lying would be not only acceptable but necessary when discussing lying to Nazi thugs (117).) But the issue in everyday democratic politics surely must be how to keep lying to acceptable limits and how to think about those who lie to bring about worthwhile and laudable ends rather than thinking that it can be largely eliminated by structural changes to the institution. As for the ‘lesson’ Coady offers, it borders on the absurd. Of course, where we can, we ought to try and prevent the situations that give rise to the need for politicians to dirty their hands. This is a strong moral obligation over which there is no disagreement by those who advocate the inevitability of dirty hands scenarios. However, what makes genuine dirty hands scenarios so pernicious is that they arise despite our best efforts to prevent them from obtaining, and compromise our moral goodness as a result.
Virtue ethics is sometimes far better at capturing the fullness of the moral problems we face in private and political life.
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to Eve Garrard, Ben Saunders and an anonymous reviewer for comments and suggestions on how to improve the review.
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de Wijze, S. The Challenge of a Moral Politics: Mendus and Coady on Politics, Integrity and ‘Dirty Hands’. Res Publica 18, 189–200 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9153-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9153-3