The problem of political dirty hands: Moral absolutism, dynamic setting and Confucian thought

The political problem of dirty hands refers to a situation where a politician must act immorally in order to achieve moral outcomes — doing wrong to do right (Wizje 2007). The philosophy of this problem debates the exact criteria that a moral conflict has to meet in order to be a case of dirty hands, and what we ought to do in such a scenario. By following the footsteps of Walzer’s seminal article I will argue his approach to normative moral absolutist is philosophically dissatisfactory. Reconstruction of Tillyris’ dynamic narrative telos-based virtue ethical approach mimics moral absolutist normativity without problematizing the overall thesis of DH. I will then argue for an agent-inwardness problem that Tillyris' theory faces, and introduce an alternative “virtuous political” approach, namely, virtue politics, which solves the problem by incorporating both the political action and the moral agent. Virtue politics is constructed from a comparative study of dirty hands in Confucian...Show moreThe political problem of dirty hands refers to a situation where a politician must act immorally in order to achieve moral outcomes — doing wrong to do right (Wizje 2007). The philosophy of this problem debates the exact criteria that a moral conflict has to meet in order to be a case of dirty hands, and what we ought to do in such a scenario. By following the footsteps of Walzer’s seminal article I will argue his approach to normative moral absolutist is philosophically dissatisfactory. Reconstruction of Tillyris’ dynamic narrative telos-based virtue ethical approach mimics moral absolutist normativity without problematizing the overall thesis of DH. I will then argue for an agent-inwardness problem that Tillyris' theory faces, and introduce an alternative “virtuous political” approach, namely, virtue politics, which solves the problem by incorporating both the political action and the moral agent. Virtue politics is constructed from a comparative study of dirty hands in Confucian thought articulated by Kim Sungmoon (2016), with a particular focus on Mencius’ writings.Show less

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The problem of political dirty hands: Moral absolutism, dynamic setting and Confucian thought