At least in the past fifty years, supervenience has been an ubiquitous philosophical concept – employed from metaphysics to ethics. The paper focuses on uses of supervenience in the field of ethics. After a brief survey of the classical debate between realists and anti-realists on supervenience (main participants: Hare, Blackburn, Brink and Railton), an account of the view of language involved in supervenience is presented. Relying on such an account, a turning point is placed in the Nineties, when supervenience was either weakened (in authors like Frank Jackson and Russ Shafer-Landau) or definitely discarded (by J. Dancy and J. Griffin). Both moves lead to a new face taken by normative theory, which ceases to revolve around universal principles – or at least it ceases to build universal principles in the traditional way, by generalizing on similar cases.
