The wonderful Normblog writes on the problem of dirty hands:

One standard way in which acute conflicts of choice can arise is when people are forced to decide between doing what will have the best consequences overall and respecting a moral constraint entailed by somebody’s rights. Or take a case involving not action, but inaction - inaction in the face of grave wrongdoing … Primo Levi and other Holocaust survivors (see here) have described the feelings of shame that overcame them when they were forced to stand by and witness an atrocity by the SS against fellow prisoners in the camps. Inmates at Auschwitz were forced to be present at hangings. These people were not actively engaged in perpetrating a wrong, and they had no rational option available to them other than to stand mute, since to protest would bring virtually certain death upon them; and yet part of the reason for the sense of moral shame they profess was the sense that by doing nothing they became accomplices. Whatever the deadly consequences of protesting, of trying to intervene, they had an ineradicable sense that they were morally bound not to stand by passively to evil. It is a comparable structure of choice when someone is called on - or forced - to perform an action that may have beneficial consequences overall but involves some terrible moral violation of someone’s life or most fundamental rights.

Amazing insight, isn’t it?