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In this article, I offer a novel account of why compromising in politics is likely to involve the kind of politically admirable but morally wrongful behavior at stake in the dirty hands thesis. On the view I defend, politicians do not dirty their hands just because they compromise on matters of principle. Rather, when forging a political compromise, negotiators can either comply with the requirements of ethical compromise-making or abide by the special obligations they have to their representees, but will struggle to satisfy both demands. As a result, subsequent to such compromises, residual moral claims about how the compromise was negotiated will almost inevitably emerge and compromise-makers will not be able to explain their conduct in a way that can cancel these grievances. It is in this sense that forging political compromises can be "dirty" even if choosing to compromise is the politically responsible thing to do.

The complaint that many professional politicians lack integrity is common. However, it is unclear what such a judgement amounts to. Taking various codes of political ethics in the United Kingdom as my starting point, I examine the extent to which we can understand political integrity as a matter of politicians adhering to the obligations that official codes of ethics prescribe and, in a more general sense, the public-service ethos that underpins these codes. I argue that although this way of approaching the issue usefully draws our attention to an important class of positional duties that apply to politicians, commitment to principled political causes plays a further, indispensable role in coherent assessments of political integrity. In consequence, I claim that politicians of integrity succeed in furthering their deepest political commitments while avoiding malfeasance or misconduct. As such, the ascription of political integrity can often only be made when assessing a long train of action.

This service record is an account of military actions during the American Civil War by veteran E. T. Hall dated from 1905. ; All descriptive lists and service records in this United Confederate (Civil War) Veterans manuscript collection believed to be based out of Robert E. Lee Camp #158 of the United Confederate Veterans (Fort Worth, Tex.). ; The Southwest Collection Manuscript Record can be accessed at the following URL: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/ttusw/00119/tsw-00119.html ; 1 leaf, 2 pdf pages.

This paper grapples with Bernard Williams's prima vista enigmatic assertion that '[w]hether it is a matter of good philosophical sense to treat a practice as a violation of human rights, and whether it is politically good sense, cannot ultimately constitute two separate questions'. Though Williams's approach to thinking about human rights has a number of affinities with other 'political' and 'minimalist' understandings, we highlight its distinctive features and argue that it has significant implications for our understanding of human rights along a number of key dimensions. We then proceed to explain how Williams's way of thinking about human rights coheres with certain aspects of the reasoning of one of the most important international human rights courts, to wit, the European Court of Human Rights. This lends further plausibility to the view that a politically realistic understanding of human rights, of the kind urged by Williams, should be taken seriously, since it is a plausible candidate for the explanation of important aspects of human rights practices. We close by examining the suggestion that thinking in these terms is worryingly conservative.