Dirty Hands: Doing Wrong to do Right

Abstract

Can it be right to do wrong? Could it ever be the case that it is right to execute one innocent person in order to save the lives of ten others? Could situations arise where it would be permissible — even laudatory — to punish a person known to be innocent? Elizabeth Anscombe maintained that anyone who even contemplated such scenarios showed a corrupt mind.¹ Alan Donagan argues that the problem of dirty hands, doing what is wrong to do right, ‘arises from a twofold sentimentalisation: of politics, imagining it as an arena in which moral heroes take hard (that is, immoral) decisions for the good of us all; and of common morality, ignoring the conditions it places on the immunities it proclaims’.² Utilitarians, such as Brandt and Hare, argue that such questions simply heap confusion on already difficult situations. To ask such a question is to reveal a deep misunderstanding of morality, one that is uncritical and primitive.