Dirty Hands and Pollution

The problem of dirty hands has received much academic attention in contemporary moral philosophy. Because it has been cast as a moral dilemma in the process, it has been reduced to a choice between either morality or politics and restricted to a limited set of cases. In this thesis, I argue that the problem of dirty hands pollutes the distinction between morality and politics itself. A survey of the moral dilemma approach shows that the methodological insistence on distinctions can be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The moral situation of extrication is defined and developed in order to show how the distinction between morality and politics is, in fact, polluted. These theoretical tools are then put to concrete use in a re-examination of Soviet Marxism’s historical development, which exhibits a constant intermingling of theory and practice.