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.