'Learning how not to be good': Machiavelli and the Standard Dirty Hands Thesis.
Abstract'It is necessary to a Prince to learn how not to be good'. This quotation from Machiavelli's The Prince has become the mantra of the standard dirty hands (DH) thesis. Despite its infamy, it features proudly in most conventional expositions of the dirty hands (DH) problem, including Michael Walzer's original analysis. In this paper, I wish to cast a doubt as to whether the standard conception of the problem of DH-the recognition that, in certain inescapable and tragic circumstances an innocent course of action is unfeasiblefully captures Machiavelli's message and its terrifying implications. In particular, I argue that the standard DH thesis is inadequately 'static': it conceives the conflict between ordinary morality and political morality as a stark, momentary and rare paradox of action-an anomaly disrupting the normality of harmony. As such it misconceives both the extent and the nature of the rupture between morality and politics. In this sense, the argument I shall advance does not just involve an exercise in the history of political thought. Rather, I want to suggest that, by virtue of its failure to take Machiavelli's insights seriously, the standard DH thesis fails to live up to its purported capacity to capture the complexity and fragmentation of our moral cosmos and that, consequently, it is nothing more than a thinly veiled version of the idealism and monism it purports to reject.
Keywords Machiavelli; Dirty hands; Moral conflict; Political virtue; Moral vice; Innocence
IntroductionCynicism about politics is ubiquitous and not without reason. In his famous essay Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands, Michael Walzer (1973: 163) remarks that, it is the "'conventional wisdom'" that "politicians are a good deal worse, morally worse, than the rest of us". This attitude, he maintains, should not be explained with reference to cases of mere sleaze but should be traced to a different, more unsettling, concern: the dirty hands (DH) problem.Reduced to its essentials, the Walzerian vogue of the DH problem holds that, in certain tragic circumstances, politicians may be required from a normative and prudential perspective to do or tolerate things that are immoral. For instance, they might have to torture terrorists in order to divulge life-saving information or deceive for the sake of political success. The DH thesis suggests that, in such instances, there exists a disharmony between ordinary morality -which is, as claimed, deontological -and the demands of successful political action -which are thought to be consequentialist 1 . And whilst the 1 Several DH theorists suggest that Walzer's (1973) original conception of DH is too narrow: they argue that, like Machiavelli, Walzer unsatisfactorily restricts DH to politicians; whilst politics is somehow special, the DH dilemma