Critiques of Dirty Hands. The DH framework is not without its critics. Much of this thesis will be spent answering criticisms and restructuring the notion of ATC-justified dirt in response. There are three broad categories of criticism. First, some critics reject the validity of the project of DH, questioning the notion of permissible wrongdoing and denying that the right action can genuinely create true moral remainders. Second, some critics take aim at the framework in which DH choices are usually presented, arguing that these theories pay inadequate attention to context or obscure the true nature of political dirt. Third, some critics reject the view that DH can coherently arise within democracies. Regarding the first category, there are several ways to argue that the core theoretical tenets of DH are incoherent or undesirable. One version of this is purism, also known as absolutism (though I favour ‘purism’ here as other views could also be interpreted and enforced in absolutist ways). Strong purists believe that no allowance should be made to the gritty realities of politics, and we should act as moral agents regardless of circumstance or expediency. The weaker form of purism focuses instead on certain deontic constraints that cannot be violated. Another approach is specificationism (Thomson, 1976). Under this view, when two obligations clash, one or both obligations must be reinterpreted to make the conflict go away. The most interesting forms of this first category, however, are to be found in threshold deontology and (most influentially) consequentialism. Threshold deontologists argue that we should respect deontic constraints up until a point of severe enough emergency where these rules can then be waived. Consequentialists argue that the best action is to be determined based on its consequences, whether this is from maximising utility or minimising evil. What unites these views — purism, specificationism, threshold deontology, and consequentialism — is a rejection of the core idea of DH: that something can be both the right thing to do and simultaneously have a meaningfully wrongful element. The second category of criticisms focuses on the framework of DH, accepting (the possibility of) permissible wrongdoing yet arguing that the model used by theorists such as Xxxxxx is misleading. One such criticism is that it is unhelpful and misleading to focus on DH dilemmas (Xxxxxxxx, 2015; 2019a). An episodic focus on single instances of paradoxical choice or tragic conflict, where...
