The Problem of Dirty Hands in Politics: Peace in the Vegetable Trade

Abstract

AbstractMost treatments of the problem of dirty hands in politics assume that merely holding a position of great political power will require a political actor to violate important moral standards. They assume that the successful political leader must inevitably be morally corrupted by the iniquitous choices that must inevitably be made, and, further, that this casts a shadow upon political life as a moral enterprise. This article argues, instead, that the conventional dirty hands problem is not particularly significant and that a much more serious test of the moral quality of public life in a given polity is how it makes its arrangements for formal public retrospection upon and judgment of the inevitable episodes of unwise, intemperate or immoral political action by leaders. In short, it is the deliberate corruption of democracy that should attract our scrutiny, not the condition of the soul of the supra-ethical or maverick leader.