Today, much critical work on human rights is devoted to deflating the notion that human rights are the codification of a moral sense originating in human nature. Such a claim has little critical purchase on neoliberal accounts of human rights. Hayek, for instance, explicitly rejected the view that morals and rules are ‘permanently implanted in an unalterable nature of man’. His mentor Mises had put it in these blunt terms decades earlier: ‘The fact is that Nature grants no rights at all’. Rejecting the dichotomy between natural law and rationally constructed rules, Hayek argued that culture, institutions and morals are ‘neither natural nor artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed’. Morals develop, he argued, through the unconscious selection of the values and institutions that provide those who submit to them with the greatest benefits. The morals of the market initially emerged in urban, commercial centres, Hayek argued, where substantive bonds were weaker and individuals more accustomed to cooler, more distant market relations with others.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 28