 We might usefully contrast this with the position of the school of thinkers called “political realists” whose outlook has some affinity with the dirty hands theorists to the point that the two are sometimes confused. Realists are often viewed (and often present themselves) as rejecting the comprehensive relevance of morality by reference to something special about politics or international relations. So we find E.H. Carr stating as “the realist view” that “no ethical standards are applicable to relations between states…” (Carr 1962, 153). Other realists come close to this, though their views are clouded by uncertainties about morality’s provenance (as indeed are Carr’s). Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for instance, claims: “The raw material of foreign affairs is, most of the time, morally neutral or ambiguous. In consequence, for the great majority of foreign-policy transactions, moral principles cannot be decisive” (Schlesinger 1971, 73).The influential American realist, Hans Morgenthau, is anxious to separate politics from morality by maintaining “the autonomy of the political sphere.” He recognises the autonomy of other spheres such as economics, law and morality, but insists that the political realist must “subordinate these other standards to those of politics” (Morgenthau 2006, 13). Here, he echoes the position of the German conservative thinker Carl Schmitt by whom he was clearly influenced. Schmitt became embroiled with the Nazi Party in the 1930s and enjoyed (if that is the word) some fame for a time as a theoretician for the Nazi cause. These quotations all suggest the idea that politics, or some significant area of it, such as international relations, falls quite outside the provenance of morality, thus denying morality comprehensiveness, though the reference to morality’s failure to be “decisive” hints at a denial of dominance. There are many obscurities in the stance of political realism, and this is not the place to unravel them, but in spite of the ambiguities in pronouncements of the leading theorists in the school, and in spite of some continuity between their outlook on politics and that of the dirty hands theorists, it is clear that the realist’s attitude to morality usually has quite a different flavour to that of the dirty hands  theorists.[3] Part of this is captured by the difference between the denials of comprehensiveness and dominance, and this connects with the fact that when realists reject moral considerations they do so with no deep sense of regret or remorse for having done what is morally wrong.