    Bernard Williams does indeed distinguish levels of gravity in the sinning required of politicians in his exploration of the scope of dirty hands, but he also suggests that the politician’s necessary immoralities are very common and distinctive. He distinguishes between the morally “disagreeable or distasteful” and the morally criminal, the latter being subsumed under a broad category of what he calls “violence” (Williams 1978, 71). Although Williams allows that some political actions that are popularly believed to be morally dubious, may well be morally acceptable when circumstances are properly understood, he casts a pretty wide net for the morally disagreeable. It involves such things as “lying, or at least concealment and the making of misleading statements; breaking promises; special pleading; temporary coalition with the distasteful; sacrifice of the interests of worthy persons to those of unworthy persons; and (at least if in a sufficiently important position) coercion up to blackmail” (Williams 1978, 59). Yet it is unlikely that all of these, as so generally described, are morally wrong in all circumstances. True, some philosophers have held as much for some of these—Augustine, Aquinas and Kant for lying, and Kant for promising—but surely lying is acceptable in extreme circumstances such as the need to protect an innocent person from a murderer, and even coercion (depending on the definition) isn’t always morally wrong, witness the coercive detention of people reasonably suspected of contagious disease that they are unaware of. It seems that most, if not all the things Williams mentions are in the category “normally morally wrong but morally permissible in certain circumstances”. Even blackmail might be in this category since blackmailing a vicious criminal in order to secure the freedom of his victim might (perhaps depending on the kind of blackmail) be morally permissible. Notions like regret or remorse are sometimes invoked to show that what had to be done was nonetheless immoral, but apart from the fact that an act such as the blackmail of a vicious criminal need not even be regrettable, there are many things one can rightly regret having to do that are not immoral, for example, punishing a child by withdrawing privileges. Remorse strikes a stronger, more moralised note, but for that very reason one should be careful not to confuse it with various feelings of discomfort, regret or sorrow for having to do certain things. Further investigation of the nature and appropriate conditions for remorse is interesting and difficult, but beyond the scope of this discussion, and its role as a criterion of dirty hands seems at best inconclusive.