Can you do right by doing wrong? A discussion with Stephen de Wijze
There are situations in political life where the right action still involves a genuine moral violation. Not the appearance of one. An actual one.
The philosophical name for it is dirty hands — and in the latest episode of Philosophy for All, I spoke with Dr. Stephen de Wijze, Professor of Political Philosophy at Manchester, about why the problem refuses to go away.
The formulation is simple: doing wrong in order to do right. The ticking bomb is the classic case — a captive who won’t speak, a city in danger, a leader who must decide whether to authorise torture. Whatever you think of that particular scenario, the structure is real. If you decide not to torture the captive, perhaps you’ve done the right thing by the captive, but you’ve let down the city. If you decide to torture the captive, you save the city but you violate the rights of the captive. In both cases, you are guilty.
This is what separates dirty hands from the Thomistic doctrine of double effect that many readers will know. The moral residue is not dissolved by right intention or proportionate outcome. Something which is guilt inducing is still done. The hands are still dirty. It is not like the Thomistic paradigm where guilt doesn’t get assigned at all. Rather, moral residue is unavoidable.
De Wijze takes that residue seriously. The guilt is not mere psychology — it is morally appropriate. In a strange sense, required.
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In this interview, we discuss a wide range of topics including its historic development from Sophocles to Augustine to Machiavelli, the post-Walzer landscape of contemporary political philosophy, and the thorny question of how you punish someone for doing the right thing.
The dirty hands problem is not, in the end, only about politics. It is about the kind of moral creatures we are — ones who live in a world where the demand to act and the demand to remain clean do not always point the same way.
The full interview is well worth your time: