ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a guideline to judge different claims for group recognition. It explores why Iris Marion Young's notion of oppression is too expansive, and even contradictory. Working class people are oppressed—because they are not given the same economic opportunities as others, because their schools are underfinanced and falling apart—but it is clear that a group remedy is needed to change this oppression. Ensuring equality of opportunity and changing the nature of work can be done without group rights. A policy of group rights makes little sense if the members of groups are freely integrating with the larger society with the enforcement of laws protecting individual rights. Land helps maintain communities, and yet territorial concentration is often morally suspect. The chapter expresses that culturally oppressed groups, who meet two parts of the framework, culture and justice, often have a strong case for group rights/recognition.
