  The discussion of the importance and extent of political community leads naturally to the question whether the need for dirty hands can be restricted to the political sphere. If hands must be dirtied to avoid widespread massacre, on the one hand, or damage to the moral-cum-political continuity of a community’s way of life, then why not to avoid the unjustified killing of individuals or small groups or the drastic disruption of individual or small group’s way of living. Why should the political community and the political role take such dramatic precedence over such significant groups as families and their associated roles? For that matter, why should it take precedence over the individual’s need for survival regardless of role? The answer to this is not entirely clear. In Walzer’s discussion of supreme emergency and the World War II city bombings, he confronts this question but his discussion is marked by what he himself calls “hesitation and worry”. It is also marked by appeals to what people are “likely to feel”, “what is not usually said” and similar phrases. He says: “…it is not usually said of individuals in domestic society that they necessarily will or that they morally can strike out at innocent people, even in the supreme emergency of self-defense. They can only attack their attackers. But communities, in emergencies, seem to have different and larger prerogatives. I am not sure that I can account for the difference, without ascribing to communal life a kind of transcendence that I don’t believe it to have” (Walzer 1977, 254). Nor, he thinks, can it simply be a matter of the numbers. Yet he persists with the superiority of the political community: “We might better say that it is possible to live in a world where individuals are sometimes murdered, but a world where entire peoples are enslaved or massacred is literally unbearable. For the survival and freedom of political communities—whose members share a way of life, developed by their ancestors, to be passed on to their children—are the highest values of international society” (Walzer 1977, 254). Leaving aside the quibble that an individual facing murder won’t find it possible to live on if she is actually murdered when perhaps she refuses to kill the innocent in order to survive, we might question the sensitivity of ignoring the way any murder victim’s close relatives find her death unbearable and the prospect of living on an agonising one. We might also wonder why “we” don’t find it unbearable to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent people to preserve the survival and freedom of our political communities. Nor is the reference to “the highest values of international society” particularly compelling. Where “international society” refers to the society of states, as Walzer seems often to mean, then it is not surprising that such states hold their survival as a pre-eminent value, but non-state agents may understandably have different priorities. A mother scrounging for the survival of her children in the desperate conditions of a third-world slum or primitive refugee camp may just as plausibly see herself coming under what Walzer calls, in connection with political communities, “the rule of necessity (and necessity knows no rules)” (Walzer 1977, 254).