  Indeed, the structure of the role morality defence of the dirty hands story provides a curious inversion of the role morality logic since that logic requires that emergency situations allow or even demand the overturning of the role duties by the more general demands of a deeper morality. By contrast, the dirty hands scenario requires the role morality to triumph over the deeper moral outlook that gives sense to the morality of role itself. Here we find yet another paradox generated by the dirty hands category. It could only be resolved by the insistence that the political role is unique among roles since in its case its moral power somehow transcends the general morality. (Or, if the dirty hands scenario applies beyond the political, it will be one of a small set of roles that is unique.) In fact, there is a strong strand of this political exceptionism inherent in the dirty hands story. Yet how could the political role have such a status? We might expect such an exaltation of the role from one such as Schmitt, but in fact Walzer himself is drawn to it. Walzer’s position has been cited as treating the dirty hands conflict as involving a clash between a rights ethic and a utilitarianism of extremity, but the following quote puts his position much more in the role morality arena. He says in his later treatment: “No government can put the life of the community and all its members at risk, so long as there are actions available to it, even immoral actions, that would avoid or reduce the risk….That is what political leaders are for; that is their first task” (Walzer 2004a, 42). Furthermore, the significance of this task is cashed out in terms of the supreme value of the specific “moral community” to which the political leader belongs. The leader’s obligations will involve calculations of utility, but, in extremis, his or her ultimate responsibility to that community trumps universalist utilitarian calculations as well as specific deontological constraints. When the “ongoingness” of a community’s way of life is threatened then the prospect is that of “a loss greater than any that can be imagined, except for the destruction of humanity itself” (Walzer 2004a, 43). These claims, if true, would certainly establish a pre-eminent, if not unique, significance for the political role, so they need close examination.