Abstract
This paper draws on the underappreciated realist thought of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Judith Shklar, rehearses their critique of moralism and extends it to a position which seems far from obvious a target: the dirty hands (DH) thesis, which is mostly owed to Michael Walzer, and which a number of contemporary realists (i.e. Mark Philp, Duncan Bell, and Hans-Jörg Sigwart) have recently appealed to in their endeavour to challenge moralism and/or tackle the insufficiently addressed question of what a more affirmative, realist public ethic might involve. In illustrating that the DH thesis is a thinly disguised brand of the moralism which realists reject, I shall not merely put some flesh on the bones of Shklar’s scattered, unsystematic objections to Walzer’s thought – the only realist who explicitly criticized his DH thesis. Rather, I wish to cast doubt on the internal coherence and ‘realism’ of contemporary realist positions which invoke that thesis and to illustrate that the discrepancy between Berlin’s, Shklar’s and Hampshire’s thought and the DH thesis: i) enriches our understanding of how we might wish to distinguish more meaningfully realism from the ideal/non-ideal theory debate; and ii) enables us to pursue a particular direction in which a more positive realist approach to public ethics and integrity might be developed – an approach which we might term Heraclitian realism, and which follows from their idiosyncratic, innovative, and radical account of the place of conflict in human life.
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Notes
Though contemporary realists are not dismissive of these thinkers, there exists considerable discrepancy between the amount of ink spilled on Williams’s and Geuss’s thought vis-à-vis Shklar’s, Berlin’s and Hampshire’s.
I focus predominantly on Walzer’s account, but the term standard DH thesis encompasses several expositions of DH (i.e. de Wijze, 1994; de Wijze and Goodwin, 2009; Stocker 1990; Gowans 2001). The paper builds on a suggestion which I have defended elsewhere (Tillyris 2015) that, despite disagreements over the scope and precise characterization of DH, DH theorists take for granted Walzer’s ‘static’ conceptualisation of DH. This is a controversial point, which I cannot defend in detail here, and which might well be disputed by proponents of the standard DH thesis. However, if we can accept the suggestion that the Walzerian DH thesis – by virtue of its static nature and abstract foundations – constitutes a brand of the moralism realists reject, my argument casts new light on what is peculiar to realism, and on what a more positive realist account of public ethics and of DH might entail.
Whilst realist accounts do not converge towards a single positive alternative to moralism, they are, however, animated by a consistent rejection of moralism – the conviction that political theorising should be conceptualized in a bottom-up fashion; that, it should be sensitive to the distinctiveness and grubbiness of politics, to people’s actual dispositions, desires, and sentiments, and the conflicts and idiosyncrasies of human life (Williams 1978, 1986, 2002; Geuss 2005, 2008, 2015; Galston 2010; Hall 2015; Voinea 2016; Rossi and Sleat 2014; Philp 2007; Horton 2017; Tillyris 2016a, b). This general point of convergence, which constitutes my starting point, is exactly what the DH thesis cannot appreciate, and on which the more affirmative realist approach outlined here rests.
This is not to say that all realists subscribe to the DH thesis. My argument unearths the existence of a neglected divide in the scholarship of realism: between contemporary realists who invoke the Walzerian thesis and inherit fragments of its moralism (i.e. Philp and Sigwart), and thinkers identified with the realist tradition, who articulate a more realistic account of DH (i.e. Berlin, Hampshire, and Shklar; see also Bellamy 2010; Hollis 1982).
This should alarm us: Walzer’s claim suggests that there exists a large chasm between ‘normal’, everyday politics and war.
This way of casting DH is also apparent in Walzer’s more recent work: in supreme emergency scenarios, he writes, ‘a certain kind of utilitarianism re-imposes itself’ and clashes with ‘a rights normality’ (2004: 40).
Whilst the temporary gap between individual and public morality – with regard to the DH politician – closes, in Walzer’s account the dirt is “transferred” to democratic citizens, who should punish the politician but cannot do so ‘without getting’ their ‘hands dirty’, and who must somehow pay the price (1973: 180). Yet, this seems to bespeak of a certain romanticism of the ideal of innocence and the tendency to ignore that dirt and conflict are perpetual, and extend to citizens’ everyday interactions.
For a more detailed exploration of the static nature of the DH thesis in the context of professional politics, see Tillyris (2015). As I suggest standard DH theorists’ conviction that DH politicians should publically reveal their dirt to regain their innocence via cathartic punishment ignores the existence of a second-order DH dilemma: either to publically reveal one’s DH to regain one’s innocence, at the cost of political ostracism; or, conceal one’s dirt and fulfil one’s political commitment, at the cost of piling vice on top of vice. The conflict between morality and politics does not evaporate, as DH theorists assume. Indeed, Walzer’s conviction that the good politician should not publically ‘pretend that his hands are clean’ – a prelude to the politician’s punishment, and to the restoration of harmony between individual and public morality – renders his account paradoxically censorious of the vice of hypocrisy: it displaces the recognition that good politicians should pay attention to the strategic aspect of their public statements; that, they are often required to hypocritically conceal their dirt (Tillyris 2015, 2016a, b).
That the DH thesis abstracts from political reality also emerges from Shue’s (2009) critique of one the examples Walzer uses – the Ticking Bomb Scenario.
One might object that this is an uncharitable critique of Walzer’s account. For, Walzer’s 1973 paper on DH ponders the possibility of moral conflict – a possibility which was an anathema to Kantians and Utilitarians. As such, the cost of failing to question the underlying premises of Kantianism and Utilitarianism – the vision of societal harmony and consensus on certain substantive moral principles – is, one might argue, inevitable, and given Walzer’s aims, necessary. Though I cannot address this objection in detail here, I wish to highlight two problems with it. First, pluralist critics of Kantianism and Utilitarianism – i.e. Williams, Berlin, Hampshire, and Shklar – also sought to defend the idea of irresolvable moral conflict but rejected the aforementioned philosophical traditions altogether, by taking deep pluralism and the perpetuity of conflict at the level of the individual and of the polis a lot more seriously. Secondly, the vision of societal harmony and agreement on certain substantive principles is, as I argue, a recurrent theme in Walzer’s thought: it underpins his conception of community in Spheres of Justice, On Negative Politics, and Just and Unjust Wars.
Note that Spheres of Justice is not the only work of Walzer which misconstrues pluralism and displaces conflict. In his critique of Shklar’s liberalism of fear, Walzer argues that politics should not be merely seen as a bulwark against the summum malum – i.e. chaos, cruelty, and injustice –, but as protecting something more positive and substantive: ‘when we defend the bulwarks we are usually defending something more than our lives; we are defending our way of life’ (Walzer 1996: 18). This idealistic vision of societal harmony and agreement on certain substantive principles of justice or morality, also underpins Walzer’s conception of the state in Just and Unjust Wars. For, states, according to Walzer, constitute a formed political association, an organic social contract, and should not just ensure individual security; rather, they should also protect a common cultural life, made their citizens over centuries of interaction (see Walzer 2006: 53–58; see also Lazar 2013: 5380 and Luban 1980).
Indeed, Walzer distances himself from the Kantian and Utilitarian universalism and conception of abstract rationality permeating his DH thesis. Contra Plato and the Enlightenment, Walzer emphasizes that he does not seek to ‘sketch a utopia located nowhere’, ‘a philosophical ideal applicable everywhere’ or achieve ‘great distance from … [our] social world’. We should, Walzer notes, avoid giving into ‘the first impulse’ of philosophers since Plato, and ‘search for some underlying unity’ (1984: 4–6). Yet, notwithstanding Walzer’s shift from humanity to community, the vision of harmony under the aegis of agreement on certain substantive values and principles remains: Walzer supplants universal, substantive principles grounded on abstract rationality, with society-wide substantive principles, grounded on shared communal understandings.
That Walzer’s account entails a moralistic, harmonious conception of community is noted by Ronald Dworkin; Walzer’s vision, Dworkin observes, is ‘relaxed’ and ‘agreeable’ – it ‘promises a society at peace with its own traditions, without … tensions’ … ‘Citizens live together in harmony’ (1983: 1–2).
This need not entail that citizens should always betray their aspirations or unconditionally tolerate others by masking their antipathies. Nor is this to suggest that order and security are unconditional goods. However, these ‘negative’ goods are of fundamental importance – securing these is a condition for pursuing other, more ‘positive’ goods (Berlin 1990a; Williams 2002; Hampshire 2000). My aim here is not to cast an all-encompassing account of when public personas should practice the vices (a task which cannot be performed in abstracto of the circumstances with which a particular agent is confronted with), but to register a more modest point: the DH thesis displaces politics and public ethics.
Though controversial (Sleat 2013), the distinction between positive/aspirational and negative/preventive morality, offers a novel way of distinguishing between different types of DH – i.e. between bloody hands, which entail the practice of cruelty and gross injustice (violations of negative morality) and sleazy hands, which entail the practice of ‘lesser vices’, such as hypocrisy, dissimulation and betrayal (violations of positive morality).
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Tillyris, D. Political Realism and Dirty Hands: Value Pluralism, Moral Conflict and Public Ethics. Philosophia 47, 1579–1602 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00071-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00071-x