  Three of the most striking and important claims of Spinoza’s Ethics are that (1) all things come to exist and act necessarily from the laws of God’s nature (e.g., EIP29 and EIP33), (2) nature does not act on account of some end or purpose (EI Appendix), and (3) nature is everywhere and always the same (EIII Preface). Collectively, these three claims entail that human behavior, like the behavior of everything else, is fully necessitated by, and explicable through, the immutable—and non-providential—laws of God or Nature. This forms a significant part of the metaphysical backdrop against which Spinoza develops his political theory. For the sake of simplicity, I will call the view that is constituted by these three theses Spinoza’s naturalism. This naturalism led him to adopt bold views about the source and status of rights, obligations, and laws that distinguished his work from that of other seventeenth-century political theorists.