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.