  In his original article on dirty hands, Walzer allows in passing that the phenomenon he is exploring might have a place beyond politics. So, he says: “I don’t want to argue that it is only a political dilemma. No doubt we can get our hands dirty in private life also, and sometimes, no doubt, we should. But the issue is posed most dramatically in politics…” (Walzer 1974, 76). This concession has, however, little influence on his developed position which is focused wholly on extreme emergency in political contexts. (The original article is, after all, called, “Political Action: the Problem of Dirty Hands”.) Other writers have been puzzled by the heavy concentration on politics. Michael Stocker, for one, rejects this restriction (Stocker 2000, 32–3). Stocker also argues that the dirty hands phenomena, though distinctive in various ways, exhibit quite common features of moral conflicts more generally, and partly for this reason he thinks there is no logical incoherence in the dirty hands story. Stocker argues that what he calls double-counting, i.e., giving moral weight to impossible oughts, and allowing for non-action-guiding act evaluations, is a central feature of dirty hands, but is not restricted to them since they occur “across the board” of moral thinking and deciding.