 The denial of dominance preserves a certain coherence for morality since it is not, as it were, at odds with itself; it is at times and in context at odds with something else which, following both Machiavelli and Walzer, might be called “necessity”. But what is this necessity? Clearly, it is not meant to be some form of deterministic necessity, since it would have been possible for the British leadership in World War II to have rejected the policy of city bombing outright, as their declared policy prior to the war had indicated they would do, a policy that their initial bombing practices indeed  respected.[4] Yet there is a trace of this deterministic thought in the idea of supreme emergency with its implication of something that overwhelms the normal power of morality. We might recall in this connection Thomas Hobbes’s argument that moral dictates cannot apply when they would lead to self-destruction. Hobbes’s idea is that the rationality of self-preservation, which itself gives rise to morality, makes acting on morality null and void when acting on it would defy self-preservation. As Hobbes puts it: “The laws of nature oblige in foro interno; that is to say, they bind to a desire that they should take place: but in foro externo: this is to the putting of them in act, not always. For he that should be modest, and tractable, and perform all he promises, in such time, and place, where no man else should do so, should but make himself a prey to others, and procure his own certain ruin, contrary to the ground of all laws of nature, which tend to nature’s preservation” (Leviathan, Ch. XV, p. 99).