The problem of dirty hands

In my unsolicited mail today there was a newsletter from a religious organization, and the first paragraph caught my eye long enough to detain me:

"Why not dirty your hands?" is a somewhat misleading title, since the thesis I want to consider is that it is sometimes right intentionally to cooperate in wrongdoing. And if it really were right one would not be dirtying one's hands thereby...

The claim embodied in that last sentence is that there is no real problem of dirty hands, because if the all-round right thing to do in any situation includes some apparently wrong component action, the latter can only be apparently wrong, the all-round rightness of the course of action cancelling or absorbing the wrongness of that component.

I am not persuaded by this view. To be said for it, I guess, is an argument from theoretical consistency. If the course of action in question is all-round right, then that is what it is, and it is a simple self-contradiction to say that in doing the right thing a person also acted (in part) wrongly. But this seems to wish away the existence of tragic moral dilemmas - dilemmas that arise precisely when and because there is no obviously good, morally 'clean', way to act in some situation. Moral life is complicated by the fact that all, or at least most, of us are sensible of the demands of different kinds of ethical consideration or demand. It would be nice if these could always be brought into a unity so as to produce a single self-consistent answer, but it isn't so. One standard way in which acute conflicts of choice can arise is when people are forced to decide between doing what will have the best consequences overall and respecting a moral constraint entailed by somebody's rights.

Or take a case involving not action, but inaction - inaction in the face of grave wrongdoing. Primo Levi and other Holocaust survivors (see here) have described the feelings of shame that overcame them when they were forced to stand by and witness an atrocity by the SS against fellow prisoners in the camps. Inmates at Auschwitz were forced to be present at hangings. These people were not actively engaged in perpetrating a wrong, and they had no rational option available to them other than to stand mute, since to protest would bring virtually certain death upon them; and yet part of the reason for the sense of moral shame they profess was the sense that by doing nothing they became accomplices. Whatever the deadly consequences of protesting, of trying to intervene, they had an ineradicable sense that they were morally bound not to stand by passively to evil. It is a comparable structure of choice when someone is called on - or forced - to perform an action that may have beneficial consequences overall but involves some terrible moral violation of someone's life or most fundamental rights.

The claim that the (putative) all-round rightness of what is done cancels any wrong involved doesn't capture the depth or complexity of moral experience. If there are different forms of moral reasoning - separate meta-ethical subsystems, so to say - making up our moral life, the fact that we are obliged in making difficult decisions actually to come to a unique decision cannot always undo the weight of the ethical demand that has, on a particular occasion, been overridden.