Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists (mainstream liberals), has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and the like. For realists the question about a distinctively political normativity is important, because they take the fact that politics is a distinct affair to have severe consequences for both how to approach the subject matter as such and for which principles and values can be justified. Still, realists have had a hard time clarifying what this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters. The aim of this paper is to take some further steps in answering these questions. We argue that realists have the choice of committing themselves to one of two coherent notions of distinctively political normativity: one that is independent of moral values, where political normativity is taken to be a kind of instrumental normativity; another where the distinctness still retains a justificatory dependence on moral values. We argue that the former notion is unattractive since the costs of commitment will be too high (first claim), and that the latter notion is sound but redundant since no moralist would ever reject it (second claim). Furthermore, we end the paper by discussing what we see as the most fruitful way of approaching political and moral normativity in political theory.

政治现实主义者对政治道德主义者（主流自由主义者）所谓的“道德至上”方法的拒绝，引起了人们对其规范性来源的担忧。一些现实主义者通过对独特的政治规范进行理论化来回应这种担忧。根据这种观点，政治被视为具有自己的评估标准的自治的，独立的领域。因此，在对正义，民主，政治合法性等进行理论化时，应该在这个来源中而不是在该领域“外部”的某些道德价值观中寻求规范性的证明。对于现实主义者来说，关于独特的政治规范性的问题很重要，因为他们认为政治是一项独特的事情，因此对如何处理这样的主题以及可以为之辩护的原则和价值观都产生严重的后果。尽管如此，现实主义者仍然很难澄清这种独特的政治规范由什么构成，以及为什么更重要。本文旨在进一步回答这些问题。我们认为，现实主义者可以选择奉行两种独特的政治规范性相关概念中的一种：一种独立于道德价值观，其中政治规范性被认为是一种工具规范性。另一个地方，区别仍然保留了对道德价值观的正当理由依赖。我们认为前一种概念没有吸引力，因为承诺的成本会太高（第一个主张），而后一个概念是合理的，但却是多余的，因为没有道德主义者会拒绝它（第二个主张）。此外，在本文结尾处，我们讨论了我们认为是处理政治理论中政治和道德规范性的最富有成果的方式。