  A relatively unexplored question concerns whether anything more informative than a reference to “emergency”, supreme or otherwise, can be provided to illuminate the typical circumstances in which it is claimed that hands must be dirtied. One line of clarification that might be attempted would be to scrutinise more carefully various broad situations in which moral action might be especially under strain in political contexts. A first suggestion might be that politics is essentially a zone of compromise, and it is the pressure of compromise that creates the need for dirty hands. It is certainly true that compromise is a pervasive feature of political life, but compromise is hardly unique to politics, nor is it necessarily a pressure for immoral conduct. Indeed, it is arguable that the capacity to compromise is an essential moral ingredient in all successful cooperative endeavours, since, apart from its instrumental value, it shows respect for other reasonable participants in public action. Nonetheless, compromise clearly has its morally dangerous side as indicated by our use of “compromised” to characterise someone whose principles have been sullied to an extent that makes them untrustworthy. Since a compromise is a sort of bargain where parties sacrifice some good objectives in order to gain others, it raises a question about how far such deals can go, and this brings us into dirty hands territory. Another situation, related to our earlier discussion of Hobbes, is that of moral isolation. As noted there, the fact that general adherence to morality has to a considerable degree broken down, might not give as great a dispensation from moral constraints as Hobbes supposes, but at least it poses starkly the rationale for compliance. A third situation that seems relevant here and needs further exploration is that of extrication. Politicians, and others, often find themselves in situations where they have inherited, or are otherwise constrained by, the decisions and policies of others (or even their previous selves) that they now judge unwise or even gravely immoral. So, for example, they may seek to end an unjust war to which their predecessors have committed the nation, but immediate cessation and withdrawal may not be desirable from several perspectives, including a moral point of view. They may very well think that the best extrication strategy requires a temporary continuation of the war, unjust as it is, with a view to a withdrawal that better secures the rights of innocent people and makes the withdrawal politically possible. Obviously, what such situations might allow in terms of continued immorality needs to be spelled out in more detail than space allows here, but equally, it seems clear that there is a potential for dirty hands discussion that moves fruitfully beyond the often-vague generalities of “emergency” or “extremity”.