  Emphasizing the shared guilt of citizens has implications for a further issue, concerned with how the dirty hands perpetrator should be treated after the event. Walzer argues that the politician’s genuine guilt means that she should suffer a penalty or a shaming for having done what “we” want her to do (Walzer 1973, 177–8; 1974 79–80). Others have taken a similar line though the position has been criticized by, for example, Tamar Meisels and Neil Levy (Meisels 2008a, 227 and Levy 2007 throughout). There are serious problems about moral responsibility in claiming that a dirty hands agent who does what is morally wrong because he must should be punished or publicly disgraced. After all, if the freedom to act is a precondition of moral responsibility and therefore blame, then the dirty hand agent who does what is (all-things-considered) necessary and somehow right seems immune to the criticism involved in blame. (For further elaboration of this and related objections see Levy 2007; also Meisels 2008a, 226–27.) The point here, however, is that, even if it is proper to blame and shame for dirty hands, then, on the supposition that all citizens share in the taint, selecting only one to shame seems distinctly unjust, indeed massively hypocritical.  While the rest of us rejoice and celebrate the happy consequences of our agent’s necessary misdeed, she is shunned or worse. As already noticed, Walzer does think that punishing the dirty hands conduct of the principal agents makes our own hands dirty (though he doesn’t seem to think that our original authorization of the conduct does this). He doesn’t elaborate the point, but it opens up intriguing prospects since presumably we dirty “our” hands in punishing these agents precisely because, in some sense, they are “innocent” or at least do not deserve punishment because they have acted “rightly”. This opens up bizarre possibilities of regress since “we” now should have to pay a further price for inflicting a price on ourselves when we have done the right (but immoral) thing in punishing ourselves, and so on and on. It seems the spreading of responsibility for dirty hands to the governed community merely adds to worries about the coherence of the concept. 