If You're Quasi-Explaining, You're Quasi-Losing

Normative discourse frequently involves explanation. For example, we tell children that hitting is wrong because it hurts people. In a recent paper, Selim Berker argues that to account for this kind of explanation, expressivists need an account of normative grounding. Against this, I argue that expressivists should eschew grounding and stick to a more pragmatic picture of explanation, one that focuses on how we use explanatory speech acts to communicate information. This chapter proposes that the standard form of a normative explanation is a generalizing explanation, one which shows a particular moral injunction to follow from a more general injunction. An additional upshot of the resulting view is that it paves the way for a purely metaphysical solution to the problem of creeping minimalism. Quasi-real properties are those that, unlike real properties, stand outside of the metaphysical hierarchy of grounding relations.