 The discussion of extrication raises another point about dirty hands that is seldom addressed. Dirty Hands scenarios are often constructed very specifically as giving the agent narrow choices restricted by external circumstances over which she has no present control. The specific scenario is often then generalised as though those external circumstances, or ones very like them, are immutable for an agent with that sort of background (e.g., a politician). This is, however,, too static and inflexible a view of moral contexts, roles and agent capacities. In the extrication story above, the politician’s “necessary immorality” is forced upon her by the circumstances she has created or inherited, but the point of invoking extrication morality within the dirty hands problematic is to insist on possibilities of temporary involvement in evil and the need to change the circumstances that require such involvement. The ruler bent on extrication must persist in waging an unjust war only because at that time there is no other way that she can end the war by changing the context. But this restriction should be seen here and in other dirty hands situations as creating a moral imperative for the agent or others to change the background against which the moral crisis has arisen so that similar situations are unlikely to recur. In the unjust war example, the politician might use eventual success in ending the war to change colonial or neo-colonial policies that fed the resort to war, to remove over-belligerent personnel from the defence establishment, rethink alliances that played a part in promoting the unjust war, and so on. Courage, imagination and luck may be needed to realise the relevant possibilities, but without making efforts at relevant changes, the agent’s appeal to necessity when invoking the dirty hands plea should ring hollow.