This dissertation inquires into whether there can be a way of conceiving human rights that will address the three main challenges bedeviling the idea of human rights, namely: a) establishing a standard of determining what qualifies as a human right in order to avoid human rights inflation and thus establish rights minimalism; b) whether it is facts about the subject's nature that ground the rights status (rights internalism) or whether rights are externally grounded; c) and whether human rights are universal or relative. After examining the works of the key figures in this area including contemporary ones like John Rawls, Charles Beitz, Thomas Pogge, and Amartya Sen, and establishing the shortcomings of their positions, to address the aforementioned threefold need, I have constructed and defended a position that human rights is a political ideology with moral inflection, and that human rights ideology is dual-natured in the sense that it has both positive and negative functions that revolve around the key issues of domination, discrimination, and exploitation. This position of mine that is a form of universality based on rights externalism sets a clear standard of determining what counts as a human right and is minimalist thereby avoiding the problem of human rights inflation.
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