Sandbu, Martin E. "Review of John Parrish's PARADOXES OF POLITICAL ETHICS." NDPR (October 2008).

Parrish, John M. Paradoxes of Political Ethics: from Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. I write this review during an election campaign that has occasioned more than the usual amount of accusations against the government. The Bush administration stands accused of lying, torture, murder, corruption, and a long litany of rights infringements and violations. Its supporters, of course, deny that any morally (or legally) questionable actions were committed at all, and that in any case, whatever was done was the right thing to do given the threat of terrorism. Theoretically, both sides could be partly right. The government's critics may be factually correct about what the government did, and its defenders may be right that officials had good reasons to believe that what they did was necessary to protect the nation from great ills. This would force us to choose between three unsavory options. The first is to argue that lying, torture, and murder are not crimes after all when committed in the pursuit of the greater good. The second is to retain our intuition that these are grave moral transgressions, but admit that there are situations in which a person ought to commit great wrongs. The third is to say "So much the worse for the common good" and insist that these actions may never be committed, no matter how great the calamity the avoidance of which seems to necessitate them. This is the "problem of dirty hands" that Michael Walzer made famous in his 1973 article with the same title. Walzer did not dwell on the third option, dismissing it -- rightly in my view -- as not morally serious. So long as there are power relations in the world, he who holds power does have the fates of other people in his hands, and there must be some cases (even if fewer than he prefers us to believe) in which keeping his hands clean amounts to abdicating responsibility: "If he remains innocent . . . he not only fails to do the right thing (in utilitarian terms), he may also fail to live up to the duties of his office (which imposes on him a considerable responsibility for consequence and outcomes)". That leaves the politician -- and the analyst of politics -- with a dilemma: Either to claim that actions that we normally consider evil are not in fact evil in the circumstances of politics or to say that they are indeed wrong, but that it is sometimes right to commit wrongful actions. Each answer is paradoxical, though in slightly different ways. The former is morally and intellectually discomfiting. It demands that we revise deeply held moral intuitions, and must explain why it seems to us that there are true moral dilemmas in such cases. The latter, in contrast, validates the perception that we are contravening morality even in doing what is for the best; but for that very reason it risks landing morality in incoherence, for (as Walzer asks) "how can it be wrong to do what is right?" Knowing what we know about the human propensity for cognitive dissonance reduction, therefore, we should not be surprised if much effort in political theory had gone into either dissolving or dissembling this paradox. That this is indeed the case -- and that this has been a task political philosophers have set for themselves since the birth of Western philosophy -- is the premise of the story professor John Parrish tells in his book Paradoxes of Political Ethics: From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand. In Parrish's account, three moments in the history of Western political thought developed an original and acute understanding of a dirty hands problem, each culminating in a particularly influential solution to it. The three periods are the confluence and friction of ideas between classical (especially Roman) political thought and the new Christian ideals, the secularizing political thought of the Renaissance, and the theories of the emergent capitalist or "commercial" society in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The book explains the unfolding of related yet original ideas into their prime expressions in the works of, respectively, St. Augustine, Thomas Hobbes, and Adam Smith. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14445.