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As near as I can tell, Dirty Business is about the action itself, while I Did What I Had to Do is more about the Stock Phrase used as an excuse for said thing.
Also, dude, you have to give people time to respond. We're not computers, you know.
Edited by wrm5Hm, I'll have to double check and see if that's actually how it's used, but I didn't notice that when I was looking them over. Thanks.
And for the record, I waited about three days before bumping this. The timestamp on the top of the thread is the most recent activity in the whole thread, not the timestamp for the first post. (You can see that it's usually identical to the last post in the thread.)
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Can someone explain the difference between Dirty Business and I Did What I Had to Do? Both of them are about choosing pragmatism over idealism — doing a bad thing for a good reason — where the person doing it regrets the necessity but not the action itself. Both tropes reference each other in their descriptions without explaining what the difference is, and there are a lot of overlapping examples.
So is there an actual distinction between the two, or do we basically have the same trope with two different names?