# Don’t mind the gap: how non-naturalists should explain normative facts

## TL;DR

The paper proposes a new way for non-naturalists to explain normative facts while maintaining a clear distinction from non-normative facts.

## Contribution

It introduces the unsupplemented partial ground approach to address the explanatory challenge in normative metaphysics.

## Key findings

- The unsupplemented partial ground approach allows for partial grounding of normative facts in non-normative facts.
- This approach avoids objections faced by other non-naturalist accounts.
- It supports the Reasons-First approach as a viable option for non-naturalists.

## Abstract

In this paper, I present and defend a novel way for non-naturalists to account for the sui generis status of normative facts, which is consistent with the claim that contingent normative facts obtain in virtue of non-normative facts. According to what I call unsupplemented partial ground approach, non-derivative normative facts have non-normative partial grounds, but are not fully grounded in any collection of facts. This view entails that an explanatory gap separates the normative from the non-normative domain. I argue that this account provides non-naturalists with a metaphysically coherent response to the challenge of accounting for explanatory dependence relations between two domains while positing metaphysical discontinuity (explanatory challenge), and avoids serious objections that alternative non-naturalist accounts face. Moreover, I show that the unsupplemented partial ground approach is an attractive option for the popular Reasons-First approach, which is often, but I argue prematurely, considered a particularly promising account for non-naturalists.