According to one understanding of the problem of dirty hands, every case of dirty hands is an instance of moral conflict, but not every instance of moral conflict is a case of dirty hands. So, what sets the two apart? The dirty hands literature has offered widely different answers to this question but there has been relatively little discussion about their relative merits as well as challenges. In this paper I evaluate these different accounts by making clear which understanding of concept distinctness underlies them and which of them is, ultimately, the most plausible one in the case of dirty hands and ordinary moral conflict. In order to do so, I will borrow from the terminology employed in recent debates in the philosophy of evil which have tackled a similar problem to the one at hand, i.e. defining what sets evil apart from ordinary wrongdoing. Here it has been argued that concepts could be distinct in three ways: they can have a quantitative difference, a strong qualitative or a moderate qualitative difference. I conclude that the most convincing definition of dirty hands draws a moderate qualitative distinction between ordinary moral conflict according to which dirty hands are those moral conflicts that involve a serious violation or betrayal of a core moral value.

根据对脏手问题的一种理解，脏手的每一种情况都是道德冲突的一个例子，但并非道德冲突的每一种情况都是脏手的一个例子。那么，什么使两者区别开来呢？脏手文献为这个问题提供了广泛不同的答案，但是关于它们的相对优点和挑战的讨论相对较少。在本文中，我通过阐明对概念差异的哪些理解是它们的基础，以及在脏手和普通道德冲突的情况下，其中哪一种最终是最合理的解释，来评估这些不同的描述。为了做到这一点，我将借鉴最近在邪恶哲学辩论中使用的术语，这些术语解决了与手头的问题类似的问题，即定义什么使邪恶与普通的过错有所不同。在这里，人们认为概念可以通过三种方式来区分：它们可以具有数量上的差异，强烈的定性或中等的定性差异。我得出的结论是，最有说服力的脏手定义在普通道德冲突之间进行了适度的定性区分，根据脏手是那些涉及严重违反或背叛核心道德价值的道德冲突。