‘Moral Responsibility of Public Officials: The Problem of Many Hands’

Philosophers and political scientists in recent years have begun to apply moral principles to public policy and to public officials.1 None of these scholars supposes that moral principles can, without modification, be directly deployed in politics. Indeed, one of their preoccupations is the possibility that public life may require officials to act in ways that would be wrong in private life, raising the classic problem of “dirty hands” (Walzer, 1973). But in a significant respect, their analyses are often apolitical: the official they portray agonizing over a moral dilemma seems a solitary figure, single-handedly gathering information and implementing decisions. This paradigm of the lonely leader obscures a pervasive feature of modern government-a feature that stands in the way of applying moral principles, whatever their content, to individual officials. Because many different officials contribute in many ways to decisions and policies of government, it is difficult even in principle to identify who is morally responsible for political outcomes. This is what I call the problem of many hands.