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Let us work through an example, and the simpler and commoner the better.

There is perhaps no value statement on which people would more universally agree than the statement that intense pain is bad.

Let us take a set of circumstances in which I happen to be interested on the legislative side and in which I think every one of us might naturally make such a statement.

We come upon a rabbit that has been caught in one of the brutal traps in common use.

There are signs that it has struggled for days to escape and that in a frenzy of hunger, pain, and fear, it has all but eaten off its own leg.

The attempt failed: the animal is now dead.

As we think of the long and excruciating pain it must have suffered, we are very likely to say: `` It was a bad thing that the little animal should suffer so ''.

The positivist tells us that when we say this we are only expressing our present emotion.

I hold, on the contrary, that we mean to assert something of the pain itself, namely, that it was bad -- bad when and as it occurred.