  However it should be located, the phenomenon of dirty hands can be easily assimilated to that of moral dilemma, but this is an assimilation that should be resisted. Someone confronted with a supreme emergency is indeed in what is often colloquially called “a moral dilemma” in the sense that she faces a disturbing and difficult choice situation, but that does not make it a moral dilemma in a philosophically interesting sense. In common parlance all sorts of situations that cause initial uncertainty and require hard moral thinking to sort out are called moral dilemmas, as philosophers who teach or consult on business ethics are fully aware. This usage is harmless enough, but the philosophical usage of the term points to a more disturbing situation and one that needs to be distinguished from dirty hands. Both the categories of dirty hands and moral dilemma involve agonising choice in which there will be grave moral loss either way. The most salient difference between the categories is that a moral dilemma arises only when the choice is such that neither horn is decisively supported by morality, indeed morality speaks equally against both. (There is a parallel dilemma for non-moral normative contexts, if there be any, where normative reasons speak equally against doing p or doing not-p.) Whichever way the agent chooses, her action is unjustified and there is no question of one course being more necessary or demanded than the other. By contrast, the dirty hands choice is always dictated as the “necessary” course: in the context of political emergencies, the community defence always wins the day even over innocent lives. This is the special feature that marks off dirty hands from moral dilemmas.