Political realism and dirty hands: value pluralism, moral conflict and public ethics

This paper draws on the underappreciated realist thought of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Judith Shklar, rehearses their critique of moralism and extends it to a position which seems far from obvious a target: the dirty hands (DH) thesis, which is mostly owed to Michael Walzer, and which a number of contemporary realists (i.e. Mark Philp, Duncan Bell, and Hans-Jörg Sigwart) have recently appealed to in their endeavour to challenge moralism and/or tackle the insufficiently addressed question of what a more affirmative, realist public ethic might involve.

In illustrating that the DH thesis is a thinly disguised brand of the moralism which realists reject, I shall not merely put some flesh on the bones of Shklar’s scattered, unsystematic objections to Walzer’s thought – the only realist who explicitly criticized his DH thesis. Rather, I wish to cast doubt on the internal coherence and ‘realism’ of contemporary realist positions which invoke that thesis and to illustrate that the discrepancy between Berlin’s, Shklar’s and Hampshire’s thought and the DH thesis: i) enriches our understanding of how we might wish to distinguish more meaningfully realism from the ideal/non-ideal theory debate; and ii) enables us to pursue a particular direction in which a more positive realist approach to public ethics and integrity might be developed – an approach which we might term Heraclitian realism, and which follows from their idiosyncratic, innovative, and radical account of the place of conflict in human life.

Bell, D. (2010): Political Realism and the Limits of Ethics in D. Bell (ed.) Ethics and World Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 93-105.

Bellamy, R (2010): Dirty Hands and Clean Gloves: Liberal Ideals and Real Politics. European Journal of Political Theory, 9(4):412-430.

Berlin, I. (1969): Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Berlin, I. (1980): The Question of Machiavelli, in H. Hardy, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. New York: Random House

Berlin (1990a): The Pursuit of the Ideal, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. London: John Murray,1-19.

Berlin, I. (1990b): The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity. London: John Murray,20-50.

Berlin, I. (1999) Does Political Theory Still Exist? In H. Hardy & R. Hausheer (eds.) The Proper Study of Mankind. London: Vintage.

Coady, C.A.J (2008): Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Coady, C.A.J. (2014): The problem of dirty hands, in E.N. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/dirty-hands (Accessed: 16 November 2017)

Galston, W. (2010): Realism in Political Theory, European Journal of Political Theory,9(4):385-411.

Geuss, R. (2005): Outside Ethics, Princeton: Princeton University Press

Geuss, R. (2008): Philosophy and Real Politics. Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Geuss, Raymond. (2015). Realism and the relativity of judgement. International Relations, 29(1):3-22.
Gowans, C. W. (2001): Innocence Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hamlin, A., & Stemplowska, S. (2012): Theory, Ideal Theory and The Theory of Ideals. Political Studies Review,10(1):48-62.

Hampshire, S (1978): Public and Private Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hampshire, S. (1982): Against Simplicity: A Review of Moral Luck by Bernard Williams, London Review of Books.

Hampshire, S. (1983): Morality and Conflict. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Hampshire, S. (1989): Innocence and Experience. USA: Harvard University Press.

Hampshire, S. (1993): The Last Charmer, New York Review of Books,43-47.

Hampshire, S. (1996): Justice is Conflict: The Soul and the City. Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Harvard University. Available at: https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/h/Hampshire98.pdf (accessed 16 November 2017)

Hampshire, S. (2000): Justice is Conflict. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Hess, A. (2014): The Political Theory of Judith Shklar: Exile from Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hollis, M. (1982): Dirty Hands, British Journal of Political Science, 12(4):385-398.

Honig, B., and Stears, M (2011): The new realism: From modus vivendi to justice, in J. Floyd and M. Stears (eds.) Political Philosophy versus History? Contextualism and Real Politics in Contemporary Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp 177-205

Horton, J. (2010): Realism, liberal moralism and a political theory of modus vivendi, European Journal of Political Theory,9(4):431-448.

Horton, J. (2011): Why the traditional conception of toleration still matters, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy,14(3):289-305.

Horton, J. (2017): What does it mean for a political theory to be more realistic? Philosophia, 45 (2): 487 – 501.

Lazar, S. (2013): War, in H. LaFollette (ed.) The International Encyclopaedia of Ethics, London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd 5379 – 5393.

Luban, D. (1980): The Romance of the Nation-State, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 9 (4): 392 – 397.

Mizra, S. (2016): Doubt and commitment: Justice and scepticism in Judith Shklar’s thought, European Journal of Political Theory, 15(1): 77–96.

Moliere (1982): The Misanthrope and Tartuffe. New York: Harcourt.

Parrish, J.M. (2008): Paradoxes of Political Ethics. From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Philp, M. (2007): Political Conduct. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Philp, M. (2012): Realism without Illusions, Political Theory,40(5):629-649.

Plato (1993): Republic. R. Waterfield (trans). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rawls, J. (1996): Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rossi, E. (2016): Can Realism Move Beyond a Methodenstreit? , Political Theory, 44(3): 410–420.

Rossi, E., & Sleat, M. (2014): Realism in Normative Political Theory. Philosophy Compass, 9(10):689-701.

Sabl, A., and Sagar, R. (2017): Introduction, Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 20 (3): 269 – 277.

Sangiovanni, A. (2008): Justice and the Priority of Politics to Morality, Journal of Political Philosophy, 16(2):137-164.

Shklar, J.N. (1984): Ordinary Vices. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Shklar, J.N. (1990): The Faces of Injustice, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Shklar, J.N. (1998a): The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia, in S. Hoffmann (ed.) Political Thought & Political Thinkers, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 161-174.

Shklar, J.N. (1998b): The Work of Michael Walzer in S. Hoffmann (ed.) Political Thought & Political Thinkers,376-385.

Shue, Henry. 2009. Making Exceptions. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 26:307-322

Sigwart, H-J. (2013): The Logic of Legitimacy: Ethics in Political Realism, The Review of Politics, 75:407-432

Sleat, M (2014): Realism, Liberalism and Non-ideal Theory Or, Are there Two Ways to do Realistic Political Theory? Political Studies, DOI:10.1111/1467-9248.12152

Stocker, M. (1990): Plural and Conflicting Values, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Thompson, Dennis. 1989. Political Ethics and Public Office. London: Harvard University Press.

Tillyris, D.(2015): ‘Learning how not to be Good’: Machiavelli and the Standard Dirty Hands Thesis. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice,18(1):61-74.

Tillyris, D. (2016a): After the Standard Dirty Hands Thesis: Towards a Dynamic Account of Dirty Hands in Politics, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice,19(1):161-175.

Tillyris, D. (2016b): The Virtue of Vice: A Defence of Hypocrisy in Democratic Politics, Contemporary Politics,22(1):1-20.

Tillyris, D. (2017): Political Integrity and Dirty Hands: Compromise and the Ambiguities of Betrayal, Res Publica. DOI:10.1007/s11158-016-9323-4

Valentini, L. (2012): Ideal vs. Non-ideal Theory: A Conceptual Map, Philosophy Compass,7(9):654-664.

Voinea, C. (2016): A realist critique of Moralism in Politics: the autonomy of Bernard Williams’s Basic Legitimation Demand, Public Reason 7(1-2):81-92.

Walzer, M. (1973): Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands, Philosophy and Public Affairs,2(2):160-180.

Walzer, M. (1977): Just and Unjust Wars. New York: Basic Books.

Walzer, M. (1984): Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, New York: Basic Books.

Walzer, M. (1996): On Negative Politics, in B. Yack (ed.), Liberalism without Illusions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 17-24.

Walzer, M. (2004): Arguing about War, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Williams. B. (1978): Politics and Moral Character in S. Hampshire (ed.) Public and Private Morality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 23-53.

Williams, B. (1981): Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, B. (1986): Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Williams, B. (2002): In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wijze, S., de (2009): Targeted Killing: A “Dirty Hands” Analysis. Contemporary Politics,15(3):305-320.

Wijze, S., de (2005): Tragic Remorse: The anguish of Dirty Hands. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice,7(5):453-471.

Wijze, S., de. (2012): The Challenge of a Moral Politics: Mendus and Coady on Politics, Integrity and 'Dirty Hands', Res Publica 18(2):189-200.

Wijze, S., de (2018): The Problem of Democratic Dirty Hands: Citizen Complicity, Responsibility, and Guilt, The Monist, 10 (2): 129–149.