Starting out by establishing a basic understanding of what “human rights” means, Donnelly leads up to his main premise that human rights are equal, inalienable, and universal, even with considerations of cross-cultural relativismcultural relativismCultural relativism is the idea that a person’s beliefs and practices should be understood based on that person’s own culture. Proponents of cultural relativism also tend to argue that the norms and values of one culture should not be evaluated using the norms and values of another.