  Most of the discussion of dirty hands concentrates upon the situation of the individual political leader who must dirty his or her hands, but another interesting question concerns the dirt on the hands of citizens themselves when their leaders act thus on their behalf. This is particularly acute for democratic citizens to whom representative theory applies more plausibly than to citizens of an autocracy. In Walzer’s original discussion, he insists that part of the tension, even agony, of the dirty hands problem arises from the fact that we, the governed, want our leaders to be virtuous, but also want them to have the sort of character that can act against deep moral principle when the supreme emergency arises. Of the politician who dirties his hands in a good cause but realises he is acting immorally, Walzer writes: “Because he has scruples of this sort we know him to be a good man. But we…hope that he will overcome his scruples…We know he is doing right when he makes the deal because he knows he is doing wrong” (Walzer 1973, 166; 1974, 68). But if so, our endorsement would seem to have some implication for our own hands. This is not an implication that Walzer fully explores, though he does say in the last sentence of his original article when discussing the need to penalise dirty hands that we can’t punish the dirty hands of the principal agents “without getting our own hands dirty, and then we must find some way of paying the price ourselves” (Walzer 1973, 180; 1974, 82).