 Viewing the peace vs. justice dilemma as a variation of the problem of dirty hands helps us better understand the nature of the tensions at play after war. Properly described, peace vs. justice is not a debate between proponents of a Kantian commitment to full retributive justice and cynical realists who are willing, in the infamous words of the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, to “dig a hole and bury the past” (quoted in Mydans 2010).  Rather, the tension is more properly viewed, like the problem of dirty hands, as a paradox: officials as well as citizens in transitional countries concurrently hold two powerful yet often contradictory moral intuitions: that in order to establish a legitimate, functioning civil society one must do justice for the crimes of the past and that to secure quiet, stability and a functioning government it is sometimes necessary and morally acceptable to leave past crimes and past criminals alone. An analogy to another such paradox may be helpful in illustrating the difference between a paradox and a debate. The problem of moral luck famously delineated by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams denotes a paradox about how we make judgments about praise and blame: we tend to think that people should be praised or blamed only on the basis of what they can control, and yet we regularly praise and blame people on the basis of the results of their actions—even if these are beyond the control of the agents involved (Nagel 1979 and Williams 1981). A drunk driver who got home safely and a drunk driver who hit a child on the way home took the same risk getting into their cars. The first intuition would require treating them similarly.  The second recommends more severe punishment to the driver actually involved in an accident.