Abstract

``Why is there something rather than nothing?'' appears to be the ultimate explanatory demand. This paper argues that the principal strategies for answering it---parsimony, necessity, causation, and brute-fact acceptance---share a common failure: each presupposes conditions that cannot be secured independently of what the question asks us to explain. The argument applies a Jurisdiction Test: an explanatory norm applies legitimately only when its application conditions are independently available. When exported to existence as such, each norm is asked to underwrite what it already presupposes. The conclusion is not that existence is inexplicable, but that explanatory norms cannot coherently be globalized. The question persists not as an unmet obligation but as a marker of where explanation overreaches.