ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Spinoza's discussion of practical laws, arguing that they are best understood as natural laws. It considers why reason would dictate lawlike commands. The chapter suggests that reason, for Spinoza, requires philosophers to adopt a kind of impartial perspective that does not attend to particular properties or one's position in space and time. It considers how Spinoza's view of the natural law bears on his view of autonomy. The chapter argues that Spinoza's ethics provides a different philosophical framework for defending claims often identified with Kantian ethics, that philosophers become autonomous by being moral and that autonomy is the basis of morality. Spinoza distinguishes between naturally necessary laws, such as physical laws, and 'man-made' laws. Unlike human laws, though, divine laws are necessarily rational and do not depend on political enforcement mechanisms. In this sense, they resemble natural laws as they were commonly understood, except that Spinoza's are not decreed or enforced by a divine will.
