ABSTRACT
Liberal States face a dilemma when called upon to acknowledge a collective right to compensation for oppressive and unjust treatment on the part of minority ethnic groups within their populations. Whilst some collective rights can be accommodated within the values of liberalism, those claimed by groups that have no apparent moral standing in themselves (such as ethnic or racial groups) appear to conflict in particular with the liberal value of individualism. Attempts to resolve the dilemma create their own peculiar difficulties and this is nowhere more clearly manifest than in the practice of large scale compensatory policy such as affirmative action as used in the United States of America.
