 So far, this entry has focused on the significance of supervenience for claims about the nature of ethical thought, talk, and metaphysics. However, influential early discussions of this sort of thesis seemed to have something else in mind. For example,  Section 2  above quoted an evocative passage from Henry Sidgwick. But Sidgwick’s point was not to argue about the metaphysics of ethics. Rather, he was proposing a supervenience-like idea as an epistemological corrective to ad hoc special pleading in one’s ethical reasoning (1907, 209).