Dirty Hands Politics: Just Another Type of Corruption?

When it comes to defining dirty hands politics, or “doing wrong to do right”, the first step it to distinguish it from other forms of unethical behavior by officeholders such as corruption, noble cause corruption and officeholder disobedience. This will help better understand the moral complexity that shrouds dirty hands questions and sets them apart from other forms of unethical conduct and misuses of power by officeholders. In dirty hands cases, the moral prohibitions are violated to bring about a greater good, or at the very least a lesser evil. This provides a justification for the breaching of laws and moral principles that happens in dirty hands scenarios. According to Ceva and Ferretti (2021), political corruption occurs whenever officeholders, acting in their institutional capacity, use their power of office to pursue an agenda whose rationale may not be vindicated as in reference to the terms of their mandate. But in dirty hands scenarios, moral violations such as the ticking bomb scenario are entirely coherent with the duty of protection of the political community required of democratic officeholders. The duty to protect and defend the political community is often explicitly stated when officeholders are sworn in, therefore not only coherent with the terms of the mandate but explicitly required. In noble cause corruption, officeholders sacrifice their duty of office in favour of their personal morality. In dirty hands politics, officeholders sacrifice their personal morality to fulfill their duty of office. Both dirty hands politics and officeholder disobedience involve a breach of law, albeit for different reasons. In dirty hands politics, the aim is to avoid an even greater evil; in officeholder disobedience, the aim is to communicate disagreement with a law or policy perceived as unjust. Furthermore, given its communicative aim, disobedience generally happens publicly, whilst in dirty hands the laws or principles are violated covertly. However, both share similarities in the way it is not clear how agents who commit disobedience or a dirty act should be treated. On one hand, not punishing disobedience or dirty acts could result in the proliferation of law-breaking activities and the justifications for said acts to be hijacked for self-serving purposes. On the other hand, it seems unjust to punish agents who either refused to act for fear of compromising their moral integrity, or acted in the political community’s best interest sacrificing their moral integrity. This paper will examine how dirty hands politics differs from other forms of unethical conduct by officeholders that manifest themselves as misuses of power, including corruption, noble cause corruption and officeholder disobedience. In order to carve out the space for DH, the paper will contain a typology of forms of immoral action or abuse of power in a democracy and an analysis of what justifies dirty hands as a specific class of actions. This typology will be useful to pinpoint the specific moral character of dirty hands and explain why dirty hands scenarios are so difficult to regulate, owing to their paradoxical justification of “doing wrong to do right”.