When faced with an emergency situation, politicians are often forced to sacrifice their core moral principles in order to better serve the immediate public interest. This is commonly described as the Dirty Hands dilemma. Dirty Hands theorists conditionally defend politicians, but they leave the dilemma under-defined. Realists think that politicians do not even need defence, but their approach is overly relativistic and fails to distinguish between moral and immoral exercises of political authority. The present study critically engages with both sides of the debate in two parts. First, I use the method of conceptual analysis — and specifically conceptual disambiguation — to find out how each side conceives of the nature of the Dirty Hands di...