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US foreign policy is hypocritical in various ways, as this article demonstrates in the course of an extensive empirical review. The question is whether such hypocrisy provides grounds for opposing US interventions abroad, in particular those which might yield locally desirable outcomes at an acceptable human cost. This article examines the question from the standpoint of a non-pacifist liberal universalism and concludes (on consequentialist grounds) that the hypocritical character of US foreign policy cannot constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting all US interventions. Nevertheless, the hypocrisy of the US remains noteworthy and deserving of criticism even in such cases because of the wider damage hypocritical behaviour can do. Moreover, US foreign policy hypocrisy sometimes sets in motion reactions that confound the benign purposes of particular interventions and so undermine the case for them. Such an effect is at work in the case of recent US intervention in the Middle East.

Race and sex/gender are commonly argued to deserve equal priority with class oppression in egalitarian politics. However, placing race and sex in the same list as what is here termed "standard-of-living class" constitutes a category error. Standard of living, alongside power and status, belongs to a distinctive list of "metrics of hierarchy" that should be accorded priority in an important respect: in the specification of the hierarchies (or "distribution strata") that egalitarians seek ultimately to eliminate or reduce. Race and sex, along with other "differentiators," matter primarily for the way they are "used" by social arrangements (e.g., apartheid, patriarchy, capitalism) to assign persons to places in hierarchies of living standard, power, and status. examining policies to promote black capitalism in post-apartheid South africa, the author shows how the conflation of differentiators (race, in this case) and distribution strata (like standard-of-living class) is complicit in justifying multiracialized inequality.