 We do not think such accounts of normativity are necessarily doomed, however. The mere fact that there is no explanation for why the base-facts are (robustly) normative is not decisive on its own. Suppose we were to claim that a certain class of facts are essentially normative, where an essentially normative fact is (roughly) a normative fact whose normativity is essential to it. And suppose we were to claim, further, that there is no explanation of why an essentially normative fact is normative. (Note that this does not entail that essentially normative facts have no explanation: some naturalists might want to claim that certain kinds of facts are essentially normative but are fully explainable in natural terms.) Taking this route, we would then claim that all other normative facts derive their normativity from those essentially normative facts. But that does not seem like an objection to the methodology; in fact, it seems to substantially advance our understanding of normativity. By way of analogy, imagine we were concerned to find out what makes an object physical. Our answer: there are fundamental physical objects called atoms, and an object is physical just when it is composed of atoms. What makes an atom physical though, one might ask? It seems that we could justifiably answer that atoms are essentially physical, while all other physical objects derive their physicality from atoms. In this case, it does not seem like we should throw out the theory just because there is a sub-class of physical objects whose physicalness does not get explained, since those objects are essentially physical. On the contrary, we seem to have learned something substantive about the nature of the physical. Similarly, we should not throw out an account of normativity just because, on that account, there is a sub-class of normative facts whose normativity is not explained.