brockm on Nostr: I never said that Davidson and Rees-Moog advance the praxeological justification. I ...

I never said that Davidson and Rees-Moog advance the praxeological justification. I said the best attempts to justify that kind of thinking do. In fact, that the Sovereign Individual is silent on its normative foundations, and simply tracks a technological determinist argument — that to your point, the incentives leading intractably towards a certain outcome — is the entire basis for my charge of epistemic authoritarianism.

An example of what I’m saying would be the notion that say “the welfare state won’t be possible, even if people want it” in the future that is laid out. That’s an implicit normative constraint that takes arguments about a common good that isn’t merely a feature of revealed market preferences, betrays a very extreme right-libertarian view at the bottom of the whole thesis.

So I apologize if I wasn’t clear enough in the following paragraph to separate the critique of the argument from the praxeological argument for the normative foundations of such a view. But I’d argue, if anything, I am trying to bring my critique against the strongest form of the argument. Which I don’t think Davidson and Rees-Mogg make, by the way.