  The first thing to notice about this is that the identification of supreme emergency and dirty hands represents a dramatic shift from Walzer’s view in his original article, and this shift reflects a significant ambiguity in the dirty hands tradition. Walzer’s accounts of supreme emergency vary somewhat in the treatments in Just and Unjust Wars and in the later article, “Emergency Ethics” (and we shall attend to this later) but in both accounts the necessity to override deep moral constraints only arises in conditions approaching catastrophe. In the original 1973 paper, however, the trigger for dirty hands is nowhere near as extreme. One example there, with intriguing contemporary relevance, concerned a political leader’s need to torture a suspected terrorist in the hope of preventing the likely killing of hundreds of innocent people. This falls well short of the criterion of supreme emergency in Walzer’s later writings where the trigger is the devastation of whole peoples and/or their ways of life. Moreover, Walzer’s other example in the original paper was of a good democratic politician bribing a corrupt ward boss to deliver him votes with the promise of improperly delivered school construction contracts. Here not only is the moral violation much less profound than in the former case, but the emergency could hardly be considered “supreme” in any sense even if we allow that the votes are needed to win an important election and that the politician is genuinely motivated to do good when elected. In Walzer’s initial treatment, there is also some ambiguity in the use of the term “dirty hands” since he sometimes uses it for any conspicuous immorality as well as the more interesting and technical sense we are concerned with. So he says “It is easy to get one’s hands dirty in politics and it is often right to do so” (Walzer 1973, 174). The first clause seems to point to the widespread temptation to resort to immorality where the second indicates that it isn’t always right to do so, hence demarcating a positive normative sense of “dirty” from a merely descriptive sense. The use of “often” shows the more concessive attitude to the scope of dirty hands in contrast to Walzer’s later view.