No Guide to Ground: Right‐Making and Right‐Makers

ABSTRACT It is often taken for granted that right‐makers, that is, the things that make something—say, an action—right, do so by explaining why it is right. This view can be spelled out in terms of metaphysical ground: right‐making just is grounding of rightness facts. In this paper, I present three challenges to this view and argue that no purely ground‐based account of right‐making is fully satisfactory. Instead, I defend a novel version of a reasons‐based account, according to which right‐makers are grounds that ground in virtue of being a normative reason. This reasons‐based account, I shall argue, provides a unified solution to the challenges outlined and entails nuanced distinctions that alternative accounts brush aside. I show that my account is applicable to value‐making relations on the assumption that value is not prior to normative reasons. The discussion thus reveals a novel argument for buck‐passing accounts of value, that is, the view that value can be explained in terms of normative reasons.