 Let us examine these in turn. The structure of dirty hands is such that it seems to involve a contradiction or paradox. The advocate of dirty hands says in effect that it is sometimes right to do what is wrong, and this seems tantamount to saying that some act is both wrong and not wrong. But the dirty hands theorist is not saying that it is wrong in some respects and right in others, nor that what would normally be wrong is here right. Rather, it is the whole act in context that is both categorically wrong and not wrong. In the dirty hands scenario we are asked to believe that doing X is morally wrong and yet it is palpably right to do it. As Walzer has more recently written of his own position, it is both “provocative and paradoxical” (Walzer 2004a, 33). Kai Nielson has urged the point even more strongly, but something of the sort has puzzled many who contemplate the problem. The category of dirty hands, as described by Walzer and some others is, according to Nielson “a conceptual confusion with unfortunate moral residues” (Nielson 2000, 140). Clearly such a dismissal would come naturally to a utilitarian or most consequentialists who would simply declare the dirty hands decision to be one in which a right act (that producing the best consequences in terms of preference satisfactions, overall increase in happiness or whatever) has been done though it may have been distressing to do it. Nielson disavows utilitarianism and calls himself a “weak consequentialist” but the upshot is much the same. He thinks that dirty hands situations confront an agent with a choice of two evils and the agent should always choose the lesser evil. No doubt, in acting against what in other circumstances is a deep moral constraint, the agent will experience distress; she will “feel guilty” but feeling guilty is not to be confused with being guilty (Nielson 2000, 140).