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Professor Lloyd Weinreb in his book Natural Law and Justice, makes several comments on affirmative action. The following is one of the most interesting:

The introduction of 'affirmative action' into competitions previously based on more or less understood conceptions of differential merit has produced the most explicit and persistent concrete conflict about the nature of justice in recent American life. Although the particular shape and scope of the problem is rooted in our history, it is a specification of the abstract contradiction between the ideas of liberty and equality. The problem is so intractable because the competing claims have no coherence within the social order generally, and there is no perceptible path toward coherence. If the minority is preferred, we deny a crucial possibility of self-determination for some members of the majority, who lose out even though they are individually more deserving according to the understood criteria than some members of the minority who benefit. If the minority is not preferred, we deny such a possibility for some of them; without affirmative action, no 'equality of opportunity' is sufficient, because differential entitlements in the past have made them undeservedly less able to compete.

Weinreb goes on to conclude that we are currently caught in a conflict between principles from which there may be no perfect solution.

There is no correct principle of liberty or equality in such a situation; the effects of principles applied in the past, which are now perceived to be wrong, can be undone only by the application of principles that also appear to be wrong. The least unjust solution --at any rate, the solution that minimizes the burden of injustice for any individual-- is for the community as a whole to bear the cost of remedying the injustice of the past and to recognize the claims of both groups, until coherent principles of liberty and equality reemerge together and become a part, seriously and substantially, of the community's reconstituted way of life.

Reference: Lloyd Weinreb, Natural Law and Justice, p. 232-233.