In Defence of Democratic Dirty Hands
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Abstract
This paper considers three arguments by David Shugarman and Maureen Ramsay for why dirty hands cannot be democratic. The first argues that it is contradictory, in principle, to use undemocratic means to pursue democratic ends. There is a conceptual connection between means and ends such that getting one's hands dirty is incompatible with acting in accordance with democratic ends. The second claims that using dirty-handed means, in practice, will undermine democracy more than it promotes it and therefore cannot be justified. The final criticism states that politicians with dirty hands are a sign that politics is no longer meeting the criteria necessary to be called democratic. The paper shows that such rejections of democratic dirty hands are based on misunderstandings of the nature of dirty hands and democratic politics.
Contributor Notes
Christina Nick is a lecturer and digital education specialist at the Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied Centre at the University of Leeds. She holds an undergraduate degree in philosophy and politics from the University of Manchester and a Master's degree in political theory from Pembroke College, University of Oxford. She is currently finishing her PhD at the University of Leeds on the problem of democratic dirty hands. E-mail: c.nick@leeds.ac.uk