Neoliberal thinkers rejected natural-rights foundations, deriving morality from market evolution

Evidence

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, 28

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the neoliberal (Hayek/Mises) rejection of natural rights and their evolutionary account of morality.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s human-rights discourse literature and to evolutionary accounts of moral norms (e.g. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers). — connects to: Free-market advocates believed market defense required a holistic spiritual worldview — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 354; Neoliberalism makes the market, not experts, the arbiter of truth — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 927; Neoliberals held that rights originate from capitalism rather than nature (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals framed the spread of markets as dependent on moral and religious foundations #complicates (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 120
• Ordoliberal and public-choice strands of neoliberalism explicitly reject Friedman’s natural-liberty rhetoric #corroborates (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 353
• Neoliberals marketed the market as natural by borrowing early evolutionary science metaphors #contradicts (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2127
• Neoliberals traced market morality back to eighteenth-century liberal philosophy #responds-to (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 205
• Neoliberalism is a self-consciously evolving thought collective, not a fixed catechism #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 141
• Ordoliberals rejected laissez-faire because markets need moral and institutional scaffolding #responds-to (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 118