Natural Goodness and the Political Form of Human Life

Ethical Naturalism attempts to explain the objective normativity effective in human practices by reference to the relation between a living in- dividual and the life-form it exhibits. This explanation falls short in the case of human beings (1) – not merely because of their essential rationality, but because the idea of normativity implicit in practice is dependent on the form of normativity’s being made explicit (2). I argue that this explicit form of normativity’s force and claim – the law in general – implies a tension between an explicit norm’s claim to absoluteness and the particularity of the situa- tional case it is applied to. This tension may seem to produce an inherent violence corrupting the very idea of objective normativity inherent in the hu- man form of life (3); in fact, it shows that the human form of life is essen- tially political. That the human form of life is essentially political does not contradict the idea of objective normativity – provided that this objectivity is not derived from a conception of “natural goodness”, but rather from the actuality of human practice and its principle, justice (4).