  It might be conceded that this is ludicrous in the debt-collecting example, but that the political role is different because of the very high stakes, not only for the politicians, but for the democratic citizens. Yet we have already seen that it is hard to contain the dirty hands story within the realm of the political, and very few political decisions are momentous enough to give politics a status sufficiently privileged to exempt its practitioners, through that role, from those deep moral constraints that restrict the debt-collector or other agents in non-political life.  Indeed, consciousness of these facts helps explain why Walzer has progressively tightened the conditions in which dirty hands apply. So the question about authorization must focus on whether “we” can plausibly be said to have authorized violations of deep moral principle in supreme emergency situations. Dennis Thompson insists we do when he says that the dirty hands politician acts “not only for us, but with our consent—not only in our name but on our principles” (Thompson 1987, 18).