 Walzer’s attitude to absolutism is (as it has to be) one of respectful rejection. He says: “I don’t believe that terrorism can ever be justified. But I also don’t want to defend an absolute ban. ‘Do justice though the heavens fall’ has never seemed to me a plausible moral position” (Walzer 2006, 7). Elsewhere, he says, after claiming that absolutism is “very old, perhaps older than anything else in our moral understanding”, that at the point of disaster or supreme emergency “absolutism represents, it seems to me, a refusal to think about what it means for the heavens to fall” (Walzer 2004a). Such a refusal can indeed be represented as obtuse, but when we come to cash out contemporary thinking about falling heavens we might think about the issue of torture, an issue that was one of Walzer’s earliest examples generating dirty hands. The easy acceptance since September 11, 2001, amongst some intellectuals of the recourse to torture in situations of emergency, frequently it would seem far short of “supreme”, has raised questions of the relevance of absolutism even on the part of those who had previously endorsed dirty hands or exceptionism of some sort. So, Henry Shue, for instance, always a strong opponent of torture, had nonetheless allowed in his original treatment of the issue that torture might be morally permissible in certain “extreme” circumstances (Shue 1977–78). But in a recent article, Shue criticises his own admission and the widespread intellectual acceptance of torture in extremis as a resort to “dreamland” (Shue 2006). By this he means that the philosophers’ stories about “ticking bomb” scenarios are basically fantasies that distract from the reality of moral assessment in the real world. Shue’s opposition is now, as a matter of practice, resolute and absolute. Others have also expressed a commitment to a sort of absolutism in connection with torture. Bob Brecher, for example, provides a criticism of the ticking bomb scenario (which is basically the scenario Walzer uses in his original paper on dirty hands) and from a purely consequentialist perspective endorses the need for an absolute condemnation of torture (Brecker 2007). So the debate about torture largely engendered by the “war on terror” has revived interest in the credentials of moral absolutism, although much about the nature and types of absolutism remain in need of clarification. In any event, there is clearly reason to approach the topic of dirty hands with a degree of suspicion regarding Lady Carbury’s enthusiasm for “beneficent audacity” and her contempt for measuring exceptional people by the “ordinary rule” appropriate to the rest of us.