Nick, C orcid.org/0000-0002-6394-6368 (2019) In Defence of Democratic Dirty Hands. Theoria: a journal of social and political theory, 66 (160). pp. 71-94. ISSN 0040-5817
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: | |
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019, Berghahn Books. This is an author produced version of a journal article published in Theoria. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | democracy; dirty hands; means and ends; moral conflict; pluralism |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 11 Jul 2019 11:41 |
Last Modified: | 01 Sep 2021 00:38 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Berghahn Journals |
Identification Number: | 10.3167/th.2019.6616005 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:147445 |