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OK I'll take on Vera's example concerning the civil rights movement. The question is whether the self-interest of blacks may have distorted their view of racial justice. Maybe it did distort it!

Before you hang me for saying that, let me explain. My own view is that blacks were entirely correct to argue (and to feel passionately) that it was unjust for their own government to discriminate against them -- to create segregated schools, to require segregated restaurants, and so on. I believe that the equal protection clause of our Constitution implies that government should be color blind in its decisions. But blacks and their white liberal (read 'statist') allies went further than that. They also felt and argued that private employers should be forbidden to discriminate on the basis of race. Now I feel, as a libertarian, that racial discrimination in hiring is both harmful to blacks and imprudent for employers. But I also feel that justice requires that employers have the right to discriminate if they wish to do so. That right is built into the rights of property.

So it may well be the case that the strong feelings of those whose interests were at stake in the civil rights movement did distort their view of justice and take them beyond what justice would allow. And perhaps a more detached, impartial view would come to a different conclusion.

And I would say the same about affirmative action. It is in the interest of blacks to receive the preferences offered by various strong affirmative action programs. But is it just for a state school to institute such preferences? Perhaps their interests and their strong feelings do distort their conclusions on this issue.

And, by the way, I shouldn't have to say this; but what I have said is as true of whites as it is of blacks.