 An initial reason to distinguish ontological dependence and metaphysical grounding is that the latter is a much stricter notion. Consider the idea that ontological dependence could be reflexive: there is nothing in theory that rules out a relation of ontological dependence obtaining in such a way that a given object is dependent on itself. It is of course controversial whether there actually are any such entities, but this is not enough to consider irreflexivity as a necessary requirement for ontological dependence. In contrast, metaphysical grounding is usually considered to be necessarily irreflexive (of course, there are those who think that this requirement could be dropped in the case of grounding just like it may in the case of ontological dependence; see, e.g., Jenkins 2011).