Claims that one must at times dirty one's hands to serve the public interest differ from "might makes right" arguments in that they recognize the force of moral constraints. They take their departure from the necessity that most people acknowledge for occasional exceptions to such constraints in practical dilemmas. In order to serve one's community or one's nation, according to such claims, one may have to act against a strong moral conviction when the only choice is between two evils, and accept the sense of guilt--sometimes the punishment--that ensues.

      Few would dispute that such choices arise. Officials entrusted with the responsibility for a community's welfare may find it harder than private individuals to escape them altogether. A second claim, however, goes beyond stressing the anguish of being forced to make choices of that nature. It holds that even the most principled and public-spirited leaders must expect to get their hands dirty if they want to get anything done. They must therefore prepare themselves by learning, as Machiavelli insisted, how not to be good. The mark of their integrity, according to such a view, is that they experience compunction; the mark of their good sense, that they overcome it when their goals so require.

      Michael Walzer writes about a harsh dilemma of this nature for a newly elected official: although opposed to torture, he gives the order to inflict it on "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 few hours." His willingness to acknowledge and bear his guilt is evidence, Walzer argues, "both that he is not too good for politics and that he is good enough. Here is the moral politician; it is by his dirty hands that we know him."

      Perhaps the best-known discussion of the choices thus posed for those who want to serve the public interest was set forth by Max Weber in 1918. Having known at close hand the horrors of the First World War, and nearing the end of his life, Weber had a far darker outlook on politics than that of Woodrow Wilson. The tasks of politics, Weber argued, can be accomplished only by means of violence. Deceit and breaches of faith are part of the game as well. They must be used with good judgment and a sense of responsibility; but those who refuse all such methods invite failure and defeat, perhaps at the hands of entirely unscrupulous leaders. Worst of all, in their absolutist strivings for ultimate ends, such innocents turn too easily to the most brutal stratagems. Religious or revolutionary "warriors of faith," Weber held, may then urge their followers to use force just one last time so as to bring about a situation "in which all violence is annihilated."

      Weber's article is still required reading in courses on government today. It is a powerful effort to dispel simplistic postwar optimism and to combat the facile justification of barbarism in the name of the highest ideals. All who enter politics can feel the tension that Weber describes between wanting to do what they consider right, come what may, and having to compromise out of concern for the consequences of their actions. Many have witnessed, in themselves or in their colleagues, how corrupting either alternative can become in practice.

      But Weber, after making these points with passion and subtlety, has no advice for those who might wish to avoid either form of corruption. He offers no support for his bitter assumption that all who engage in politics must open themselves to diabolic forces. Nor does he distinguish, in this respect, between the experience of different leaders and of nations at different periods in their history. He overlooks the dangerous seductiveness of seeing oneself as a tragic hero, forced to do the unspeakable for the sake of the community's greater good. And the stark dichotomy that he sets up between what he calls the ethic of ultimate ends and that of responsibility leaves to one side a large part of the subtle process of moral deliberation about principles and practical cases that politics at its best requires.

      Without such deliberation, most people not unexpectedly opt too soon for compromising their principles. Just as unreflective appeals to morality too often turn, in practice, into moralizing, so unreflecting appeals to the "dirty hands" rationale too often turn, in practice, into needless and unjustified exceptions to moral principles. It is not surprising, therefore, though it would surely trouble Weber and most thinkers who have written on the subject, that in practical politics the expression "dirty hands" has turned into a code word among public servants --one brought in to accommodate a multitude of "dirty tricks." Those who invoke the rationale of dirty hands so liberally may be paying lip service to morality; but they ignore the constraints it calls for and have jettisoned its requirements for careful deliberation about how the constraints apply to their own situation. Gone are the scruples and the personal anguish of which Weber wrote; gone his awareness of the risks of corruption. Often, all that remains is a quick calculation of pros and cons that includes a side mention of the guilt attached to dirty hands.

      Dirty-hands calculations come most easily when the intended victims are foreign. Bias and partisanship lead some to assume that the lives of foreigners count less than those of fellow citizens; and fear of exposure and of legal repercussions adds to the incentives for exercising more restraint at home than abroad. As a result, dirty-hands excuses are often brought in to buttress practices such as psychological warfare, disinformation, counterinsurgency, covert operations, and destabilization. To keep these activities from public awareness, officials may engage in deceit, shredding documents, establishing false chronologies--and the cover-ups, once again, are justified on similar grounds. Governments now pursue these ancient policies of aggression and deceit on a global scale with the aid of the most up-to-date technology. Private groups using similar methods likewise take for granted that they must dirty their own hands if they want to serve their political or social ideals.*

      The problem with allowing such casual and wide leeway for exceptions to moral constraints is that it opens the door, in practice, to abuses as great as those made possible by a simplistically applied absolutist approach. Here, as with moralizing, it would help public officials to consider all the ways in which such abuses take root and grow. This would alert them to the need not just to consider the short-range goal they might wish to achieve through, for example, a disinformation campaign regarding an adversary, but also to be aware of all the ways in which such a practice invites imitation and retaliation. They would then perceive the difficulty of resisting the temptation to engage in further violations of moral standards, having once chosen that path, and would note the corresponding ease with which hypocrisy can serve to explain expedient breaches of the very principles one propounds.

      The common failure to reflect on moral aspects of situations is reinforced by likening all choices to extreme cases where nothing but violent or deceitful or treacherous tactics seems capable of averting a great catastrophe--say, lying to confuse a terrorist threatening to blow up an entire city. It is then easy to conclude that most ordinary moral difficulties also call for compromise. But daily political choices are rarely of such an excruciating nature. Quick cost-benefit calculations, even if they take into account the agent's experience of dirty hands, often ignore the long-term costs--including the costs to the integrity and the reputation of agents, to others affected by their actions, and to the climate of distrust--of ignoring or breaching fundamental moral constraints. Above all, such calculations fail to take into account the cumulative impact on that climate from the policies of violence and deceit, betrayal and secrecy that they help perpetuate. Within the confines of such a cramped perspective, strategy loses all foresight and moral language is reduced to empty moralizing.

      Once these considerations are brought into the debate, those who wish to embark on actions that violate what they know are fundamental moral standards would have to accept a heavy burden of justification, rather than rest satisfied with the casual short-term calculation that is too often the rule. A careful process of considering the justification of difficult choices is utterly different from the Machiavellian advice to "learn how not to be good." If taken seriously, such a process would help agents make sure that there is no way of escaping the choice between the two evils, perhaps through some alternative way of acting. Doing so would eliminate the vast majority of actions now undertaken in the name of the necessity for public officials to dirty their hands. In the remaining cases, where no such alternatives exist, the process could help officials ascertain which is in fact the lesser, rather than the greater, of the two evils.

      One reason that overly hasty forms of both moralizing and dirty-hands reasoning fail to respond to the circumstances of difficult cases is that they skip past all such steps of deliberation to arrive at a conclusion. In that way, they facilitate biased perception and stunted deliberation. Just as we have to counter the practical damage of moralizing, so we have to insist, in order to cope with the practical damage of opportunistic dirty-hands reasoning, that those exceptions be rare and that they carry a heavy burden of proof. It is unreasonable to imagine that no further standards of judgment apply once one allows for exceptions.

      What is needed, rather, is careful attention to the criteria by which such exceptions might be singled out, a firm grasp of the framework of moral constraints, and clear procedures for accountability to justify actions taken and to prevent abuses from arising and spreading. When it comes to public officials in a democracy choosing whether or not to engage in "dirty tricks," the test of publicity discussed in Chapters II and IV requires full accountability to the public or to its elected representatives. Otherwise, the appeal to dirty hands will continue to serve as the loose omnibus rationalization that it has become for many public officials intent on casting aside inconvenient moral constraints.

      At this point, however, yet another objection is raised to the claim that such constraints have a place in the practice of international relations. Government leaders or policy analysts might agree with my argument that these constraints need not deteriorate into moralizing or be nullified by overly hasty dirty-hands reasoning. They might acknowledge the benefits of the changes that a strategy for peace calls for, and be clear about the risk to their nation and to humanity of failing to bring them about. Yet, some among them might still hold back. Given today's insecure circumstances, these advocates of a no-holds-barred foreign policy could argue, it would be foolhardy to abandon long-standing practices on moral grounds. Rather, all means--no matter how disreputable--must be at the disposal of their government for reasons of strict self-defense. In times of great danger, national self-interest must outweigh all other considerations.


* In his Postscript (p. 155), Erik Erikson points to psychoanalytical associations to the expression "dirty hands." The proverbial saying "He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith" (Ecclesiasticus 13:1) recalls the indelible nature of the guilt associated with certain moral violations. The common use of the expression "dirty hands" may also relate to a different meaning, in which people are criticized for refusing to take part in work of a physically messy nature, such as cooking or child care, or farming, expecting others to carry out all such tasks. Finally, the expression, when invoked as an excuse in politics, may be meant to suggest that those who lie or kill for the public good soil only what is peripheral--their hands--rather than compromising their spirit or integrity.