Actualizing Human Rights: Global Inequality, Future People, and Motivation

This book argues that ultimately human rights can be actualized, in two senses.
By answering important challenges to them, the real-world relevance of human
rights can be brought out; and people worldwide can be motivated as needed for
realizing human rights.
Taking a perspective from moral and political philosophy, the book focuses
on two challenges to human rights that have until now received little attention,
but that need to be addressed if human rights are to remain plausible as a global
ideal. First, the challenge of global inequality: how, if at all, can one be sincerely
committed to human rights in a structurally greatly unequal world that produces
widespread inequalities of human rights protection? Second, the challenge of
future people: how to adequately include future people in human rights and how
to set adequate priorities between the present and the future, especially in times
of climate change? The book also asks whether people worldwide can be motivated to do what it takes to realize human rights. Furthermore, it considers the
common and prominent challenges of relativism and of the political abuse of
human rights.
This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of human rights,
political philosophy and, more broadly, political theory, philosophy and the
wider social sciences.