So, your argument (ignoring the appeal to authority) is:
1.Social rights can be reduced entirely to obligations on others.
Dubious. Ignoring that maybe the value to the person granted the social right could outweigh the obligation to others, or that the holistic effect on the system might be greater than its reduced parts.
2. Social rights need to be enforced by those with power.
3. Supporting and legitimizing social rights means supporting and legitimizing a specific source of power that will enforce them.
The jump from 2 to 3 is not entirely clear to me. I think it's a valid stance to be critical, and even unsupportive of any given source of power enforcing social rights, while being fully supportive of the right itself.
4. The ones who end up in positions of power are the most ruthless and power-hungry.
5. Those people being in positions of power is so bad that it outweighs any benefit from the original cause, 1 + 2.
Overall, I'd say the critical flaw of your argument is that it's too reductive and assumes that everything very neatly follows linear, simple paths of power.
In addition, I think you can replace the "social rights" in point 2 with any law, and you will have the same points 3, 4, and 5.
I have had to interact with more than a few predators (socio/psychopaths) so make sure to incorporate them into your responses. Also, be sure to include people with different cultural values when you are working through this.
1. List me some social rights that do not require other people to honor their existence.
2. Because there will be people who do not honor other people's rights, how would you try to get them to do so? There are, afaik, no "unalienable rights" recognized across all human societies and all members therein--if you can provide some, not just aspirational, I'd love to be corrected.
3. You actually use the word "legitimizing". Who codifies and enforces laws? Who informs, persuades, coerces people to honor other people's rights, the laws explicating the consequences of those rights and the punishments for infringement? Who restrains or removes the recalcitrant from harming the rest of society?
5. The concern of how much power we have to relinquish to powerful people to support the N+1 right is the question.
0a. You missed the biggest flaw in my analysis in that I did not show that there is a correlation between the number of rights/obligations and the power given to an executive to enforce them. If just honoring one social right requires power concentration, how much more power is required for allowing other social rights?
0b. Is there a way to restrain the power of the executive enforcing social rights so that they do not have enough power to dishonor them themselves?
-- your last point about replacing social rights with laws is spot on. One good purpose for laws is to support social rights. Once we have laws, we have to have policing and courts and punishment and rehabilitation. We will also have lawmakers and lobbyists because the law is never in final release.
1.Social rights can be reduced entirely to obligations on others.
Dubious. Ignoring that maybe the value to the person granted the social right could outweigh the obligation to others, or that the holistic effect on the system might be greater than its reduced parts.
2. Social rights need to be enforced by those with power.
3. Supporting and legitimizing social rights means supporting and legitimizing a specific source of power that will enforce them.
The jump from 2 to 3 is not entirely clear to me. I think it's a valid stance to be critical, and even unsupportive of any given source of power enforcing social rights, while being fully supportive of the right itself.
4. The ones who end up in positions of power are the most ruthless and power-hungry.
5. Those people being in positions of power is so bad that it outweighs any benefit from the original cause, 1 + 2.
Overall, I'd say the critical flaw of your argument is that it's too reductive and assumes that everything very neatly follows linear, simple paths of power.
In addition, I think you can replace the "social rights" in point 2 with any law, and you will have the same points 3, 4, and 5.