Abstract
Moral dilemmas are a feature of moral life that make us vulnerable to tragic failures. But while all moral dilemmas involve unavoidable moral failure and leave a moral remainder, they do not all involve dirty hands. Recognizing that Thomas Nagel’s ideas about the availability of both agent-relative and agent-neutral perspectives from which to ask moral questions formed the backdrop to Michael Walzer’s work on dirty hands fifty years ago, this paper tries to explain why, when we must take both perspectives—thus being an agent who meanwhile considers overriding the responsibilities of our particular agency—we risk dirtying our hands. The answer to a question about what ought to happen (as judged from an agent-neutral perspective) and the answer to a question about what one ought to do (as judged from an agent-relative perspective) are utterly incomparable because they are answers to two different questions, making any all-things-considered decision, when these answers conflict, unintelligible. If we decide to act on an agent-neutral reason to violate a conflicting agent-relative requirement, then despite our not having clearly made a wrong decision, our chosen action may be unthinkable. It is with the dirt of acting as an administrator of what ought to happen—as a kind of non-agent, when agency is urgently called for—that we do the unthinkable. The paper concludes that this combination of unintelligibility and unthinkability, when brought on by being an agent who steps outside of our own agency, is the mark of a dirty hands dilemma.
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Notes
Walzer does acknowledge that the phenomenon of dirty hands occurs outside of politics: “No doubt we can get our hands dirty in private life also, and sometimes, no doubt, we should” (Walzer 1973: 174); however, his focus–as the title of his article indicates–is on politics. Many authors writing about dirty hands assume that the problem belongs specifically to politics, or that it occurs because of a clash between the different moralities applicable in the public and private realms (see, for instance, early discussions related to the dirty hands literature in Hampshire ed., 1978). A previous collection of responses to Walzer’s essay, Cruelty and Deception: The Controversy Over Dirty Hands in Politics (Rynard and Shugarman eds., 2000), also situates dirty hands within politics (as the subtitle suggests), though not all the authors in the collection believe that the phenomenon is limited to politics.
Nagel’s terminology evolves. For instance, in “The Fragmentation of Value” he speaks of reasons as having their sources in different kinds of value, calling those that have to do with what happens “impersonal” and “outcome-centered” and “objective” and those that have to do with what one does “personal” and “agent-centered” and “subjective” (Nagel 1979: 133), though he later (1986) uses the terms “objective” and “subjective” differently (and argues that both kinds of reasons can be objective). In “Subjective and Objective” Nagel makes it clear that the reasons are accessible from different points of view (Nagel 1979: 205). In The View from Nowhere Nagel defines the terms “agent-relative reason” and “agent-neutral reason”: “If a reason can be given a general form which does not include an essential reference to the person who has it, it is an agent-neutral reason. For example, if it is a reason for anyone to do or want something, that it would reduce the amount of wretchedness in the world, then that is a neutral reason. If on the other hand the general form of a reason does include an essential reference to the person who has it, it is an agent-relative reason. For example if it is a reason for anyone to do or want something that it would be in his [sic.] interest, then that is a relative reason” (Nagel 1986: 152–153). He argues that ethics must recognize the legitimacy of both kinds of reasons (and further breaks down agent-relative reasons into three types: reasons of autonomy, deontological reasons, and reasons of obligation), and reiterates his original way of putting it: “Ethics is concerned not only with what should happen, but also independently with what people should or may do” (Nagel 1986: 165).
Stephen De Wijze proposes the term “tragic-remorse” to characterize the emotion indicative of a moral remainder in dirty hands cases (De Wijze 2004). I believe that there is a cluster of emotions that can indicate moral remainders and that which emotion is fitting depends on the details of the situation. I use “anguished sense of responsibility” as a broad category that can be specified in different ways depending on the features of particular cases.
There may also be other causes of our not finding it to be unthinkable to violate a non-negotiable moral requirement. For instance, even if I take an agent-relative perspective and ask how I ought to treat a person who is right in front of me, if racism leads me to devalue that person, perhaps thinking of them as sub-human, I may find it acceptable to do terrible things to them. However, because the construction of moral requirements is a social process, whether an act is required, permitted, or prohibited–and whether this is negotiable or non-negotiable–is not determined by any one person’s subjective experience. Thus we might say that an act is (i.e. has been socially constructed as) non-negotiably prohibited, even if only some people have the experience of its unthinkability, and even if having this experience varies depending on whether someone adopts an agent-neutral or agent-relative perspective. For more on the construction of moral requirements, see Tessman (2015, 2017).
Technically, I want to allow that a valuing creature might not be an agent. I don’t want to take up here the question of what is necessary for agency, but I will assume that there may be valuing creatures, human or not, who would not count as agents.
In fact, Christopher Gowans’ entire argument for the conclusion that there are situations of inescapable moral wrongdoing is built on the claim that it is when moral values of a particular kind, which he calls “responsibilities to persons,” come into conflict with each other that moral wrongdoing may become inescapable (Gowans 1994: 121). He defines “responsibilities to persons” in such a way that it is clear that they are agent-relative moral requirements (Gowans 1994: 121–128). While I agree with Gowans that conflicts between responsibilities to persons may leave moral remainders, I am arguing that other kinds of moral conflicts may also leave moral remainders; in dirty hands cases, the conflict must be between a moral requirement that is supported by an agent-relative reason and a moral requirement that is supported by an agent-neutral reason.
Nick (2019) has argued in favor of what she calls a “symmetrical” view rather than an “asymmetrical” view of dirty hands dilemmas, and according to her definitions, she would count my view as an asymmetrical view because it counts acting on agent-neutral reasons when they conflict with agent-relative reasons as dirtying one’s hands but does not count acting on agent-relative reasons in moral conflicts as dirtying one’s hands. However, her reason for rejecting asymmetrical views is that she takes these views to come with a cost: the cost of not recognizing that moral failure is unavoidable in all moral dilemmas, regardless of what kind of values conflict and regardless of which “horn” one chooses. My view does not come with this cost, because I count all moral dilemmas as situations of unavoidable moral failure. Keeping one’s hands clean does not imply avoiding moral failure. In my view, dirtying one’s hands is just one distinctive way of failing.
My account of dirty hands not only departs from Stocker’s, it also departs from those who adopt and further develop Stocker’s account, such as De Wijze (1994, 2002). De Wijze is more explicit than Stocker is about what the dirty feature is: “in all cases of dirty hands what is common is that actions involve the justified betrayal of persons, values or principles due to the immoral circumstances created by other persons (or organization of persons) within which an agent finds herself… How is this situation different from ordinary cases of horrendous moral conflict or dilemma? The difference lies in who/what created the evil circumstances. Dirty hands occur when the evil circumstances are created by other human beings…Evil human agency is crucial to the dirty hand scenario” (De Wijze 1994: 30). Elsewhere De Wijze defines evil by drawing on intuitions about what the “dirt” is in dirty hands cases, noting that “the ‘dirt’ that adheres to (and is felt by) persons in such situations provides insights into the uniqueness of evil and the nature of its moral residue” (De Wijze 2002: 212). I have different intuitions than both Stocker and De Wijze do about which sample cases count as examples of dirty hands; for Stocker’s sample cases, see (Stocker 1990: 24), and for De Wijze’s sample cases, see (De Wijze 1994: 30–31).
One of Phillip Tetlock and colleagues’ experiments involves having subjects read a story about a hospital administrator who faces what they call a “taboo trade-off”; he is in a position to decide–from an agent-neutral position–“what will be best,” while also being confronted with an agent-relative reason to save a particular child’s life. The story about the hospital administrator is as follows:
Robert can save the life of Johnny, a five year old who needs a liver transplant, but the transplant procedure will cost the hospital $1,000,000 that could be spent in other ways, such as purchasing better equipment and enhancing salaries to recruit talented doctors to the hospital. Johnny is very ill and has been on the waiting list for a transplant but because of the shortage of local organ donors, obtaining a liver will be expensive. Robert could save Johnny’s life, or he could use the $1,000,000 for other hospital needs (Tetlock et al. 2000: 858).
If subjects are told that Robert uses the money for “other hospital needs,” then they express intense moral outrage at him. In other words, the outrage is a response to the hospital administrator taking the moral requirement that is supported by an agent-neutral reason (considering what best satisfies the hospital’s needs, overall) to override the moral requirement that is supported by an agent-relative reason (saving the life of the particular child, Johnny). Additionally, subjects who are told that Robert decides “after much time, thought, and contemplation” to save Johnny’s life also express moral outrage about him, but subjects who are told that Robert is very quick to make the decision to save Johnny’s life do not express outrage. The outrage at the length of time that Robert takes to act on the agent-relative reason is a response to Robert even considering doing the unthinkable by violating a “sacred value”–namely, the value of the particular human life as seen from an agent-relative perspective (Tetlock et al. 2000: 858–859). The outrage at Robert acting–or even considering acting–on the agent-neutral reason was found to be accompanied by subjects’ need for “moral cleansing,” suggesting that “merely contemplating taboo trade-offs may be sufficient to create a sense of moral contamination (feeling dirty, befouled) that people try to eliminate by strenuously reaffirming their commitment to defending the moral order…” (Tetlock et al. 2000: 860). I take Tetlock et al.’s analysis–and their finding that people feel dirtied by taboo trade-offs–to support my claim that dirty hands cases are those in which someone in a context of administration acts on what they take to be an overriding agent-neutral reason, violating a moral requirement that is supported by an agent-relative reason.
As Macbeth cries, in his guilty and anguished state, “What hands are here?” Macbeth, though, bloodies rather than dirties his hands. If dirt is not the dirt of immorality, but rather the dirt we step into by entering a space of non-agency, then perhaps blood is what we get on our hands when we straightforwardly violate absolutist constraints as a moral agent. [For a different, and much more developed, distinction between dirt and blood, see Thalos (2018). She argues that at least some cases of dirty hands occur when one person authorizes another agent to commit a morally required wrongdoing; the dirt is the residue from the wrongdoing, and the dirt attaches to the authorized agent; however, in Thalos’ view, blood represents the responsibility for the wrongdoing, and this belongs to those who authorized the agent, such as citizens who have authorized a political office holder to act (Thalos 2018: 175–176)].
“Threshold deontologists” may say that it is right to ignore deontic constraints when the threshold is reached. My position is different: while it may be a correct action-guiding decision to violate deontic constraints in such a case, this violation is not a right act, but rather an unavoidable wrongdoing. Walzer, too, describes the violation of absolutist constraints as wrong, but still to be done when a threshold is reached.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Stephen De Wijze and Christina Nick for helpful comments on a draft of this paper.
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Tessman, L. When the Heavens Fall: The Unintelligible and the Unthinkable. J Ethics 27, 495–514 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09444-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09444-7