These are examples of messy morality: in each, fundamental moral intuitions or prohibitions – against killing unconsenting innocents, against torture and lying – are subjected to tension by the apparent necessity of securing overriding moral or political objectives. Of course, they may not seem messy to everyone. There have been immoralists who were inspired by death and destruction. To utilitarians the moral perplexities may just seem like grist to their algorithmic mills. And there are people who think that you can do anything to defend yourself or your nation. Some thinkers try to relieve the tensions by restricting the scope of morality. For example, political realists contend, at least on the face of it, that morality has no place in politics or war, or in certain situations of ‘supreme emergency’; since morality does not apply, the tension between political imperative and moral prohibition evaporates.

But most people give morality wide remit and recognise its authority – the authority of motives that seem somehow categorically different from self or group interest, or basic drives such as love and hatred – even if they could not say exactly in what that authority consists. The difficult, messy cases remain, for most people, deeply troubling.

Some of these cases form the main subject of Tony Coady’s latest book. Coady is a distinguished Australian philosopher who has made innovative contributions to epistemology (Testimony: A Philosophical Study, 1992) but has focused, in the past two or three decades, on moral and political philosophy and the somewhat solecistically denominated applied philosophy. His Morality and Political Violence (2008) – reviewed by Anthony J. Langlois in ABR, October 2008 – is a masterly treatment of its subject. Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics is elegant, unfailingly lucid, judiciously erudite and short. The combination of these virtues should be highly regarded in a work of philosophy, but in this instance brevity tells against it. The book emerged from Coady’s three Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics given at Oxford in 2005 and it bears some marks of its provenance.

There are five chapters. The first two deal with political realism; the third attempts to resuscitate the notion of ideals motivating moral action, a notion that Coady believes has been largely ignored in recent philosophy; the fourth deals with circumstances in which engagement in evil seems necessary in order to do right; and the fifth discusses the morality of lying, especially in politics.

Coady’s discussion of lying is in the Analytic mould, subtle and substantial, though not philosophically novel. His attempt to reinvigorate the notion that ideals – of peace, justice, equality and so on – should play a more significant role in moral thought is cogent, but its gain is unclear. It seems to me that where Coady speaks of ideals, others have used the language of rights, or goods, to stake out much the same territory. In any event, the book’s principal focus lies elsewhere, at the point where morality bears on political violence, and here the philosophical work is sharp and vigorous. Two related groups of ideas dominate: those concerning political realism, and ‘dirty hands’, the situations where doing evil seems necessary to achieve an overriding good.

‘Roughly speaking,’ writes Coady, ‘realism argues for a dominant amoralism in foreign affairs where dirty hands refers to the necessity of an explicitly acknowledged immoralism.’ Political realism is not a set of doctrines but ‘a certain style of denial of the relevance of morality to politics, especially international politics’. A list of its saints may help to peg out the landscape. It includes Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Max Weber, E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger. These thinkers have in various ways insisted on the distinctness and autonomy of the moral and political spheres, and condemned the baleful consequences of moral intrusions into political deliberation.

Coady thinks that realism is flawed but has important insights and lessons to teach, the main one being: beware moralism. However, realism is misunderstood and misunderstands itself because it mistakes moralism for morality: ‘The realist target is, or should be, not morality but certain distortions of morality, distortions that deserve the name of moralism.’ An important consequence of this confusion is that realists substitute a vague conception of national interest for a ‘robust and realistic understanding of morality’.

The task, then, becomes the irenic one of reconciling realism and morality by exposing the vice of moralism and demonstrating that the realist rejection of morality is only apparent. Coady makes, I think, a plausible but finally unconvincing case. He begins by usefully outlining a typology of moralism. In ‘moralism of unbalanced focus’, for example, an exclusive concentration on some aspects of morality – say, sexuality or humanitarian rescue – occludes the significance of other relevant features of a situation. ‘Moralism of scope’ has two aspects. The first involves exaggerating the scope of morality, seeing major moral issues, for example, where there scarcely are any.

The second, more fraught aspect involves restriction of the scope of morality. Coady ascribes this vice not to moralists but to realists. That is unsurprising because it is mostly realists who seek in various ways to restrict the scope of morality. But now something seems seriously to go off the rails. For this kind of moralism, the restriction of morality’s scope, is not the realist’s target, as it should be on Coady’s official argument, but the realist’s besetting vice. From here it is just a short step to recognising the limitations in Coady’s thesis that realists ‘really’ reject only moralism. To pitch the point dramatically, the people who carpet-bombed Indochina were realists (Kissinger et al.) and their actions manifested contempt not just for moralism but for morality.

The treatment of ‘dirty hands’ is detailed and highly illuminating. The phrase (the title of Sartre’s famous play) was borrowed by the philosopher Michael Walzer to designate situations where, in his words, a ‘politician must violate the deepest constraints of morality’, remaining ‘conscious that he or she has acted immorally, even though in some sense rightly’. Such violations are to be permitted only in supreme emergencies, when ‘our deepest values and our collective survival are in imminent danger’. Defending the moral community against extinction justifies whatever is militarily necessary. Whether the threat of cultural extinction alone constitutes supreme emergency is not entirely clear.

Supreme emergency, on Walzer’s most recent view, does not involve restrictions of scope. Moral limits are not withdrawn or suspended, they are overridden – by other moral necessities. This seems paradoxical because, as Coady puts it elsewhere, we have the ‘oddity of the idea that it can be right to do what is morally wrong’. It is tempting to resolve the paradox by insisting that since morality concerns what is best to do all things considered, killing the innocent or torturing the terrorist does not violate morality because it is the morally right thing to do.

The trouble with succumbing to that temptation is the difficulty of accepting that intentionally killing innocents or torture can ever be morally right. The prohibitions against them seem somehow absolute, basic perhaps to whatever passes as moral thought. If that is right, there remain only two possibilities. One is to restrict morality’s scope, in the vein of realism, and thus retain morality’s authority, but in restricted domains; the other is to confront the possibility of paradox while ensuring that it will be instantiated only in stringently limited circumstances.

Walzer and Coady agree on the last, but they have different hopes for stringency. Coady rejects Walzer’s communitarian construction of supreme emergency. He accepts that there may be situations in which fundamental prohibitions can be violated, but argues that on close scrutiny the usual suspects are not the irresistible triggers for supreme emergency they are commonly represented to be. One might indeed hope that scrupulous examination of morally parlous circumstances will forever preclude a real need for dirty hands. But it is more likely that our moral inheritance simply doesn’t cohere, and the messes will be with us for a while yet.