 In Natural Goodness Foot makes the claim that natural norms are essential to the identification of anything as an organism: to identify something as an organism is ipso facto to view it from a normative standpoint. We can look at an organism as an ordinary physical system, but to do so is to miss its biological nature. There are two premises to her argument for this point: first, grasping something as an organism requires us to situate the organism against the background of its species, and second, to situate an organism against the background of its species requires us to consider it from a normative perspective. The first premise draws on Michael Thompson’s work on living things. On that account, identifying something as an organism situates it within the ‘wider context’ of its kind. As Thompson puts it, 