But neither was the statement empirical, for goodness was not a quality like red or squeaky that could be seen or heard.
What were they to do, then, with these awkward judgments of value?
To find a place for them in their theory of knowledge would require them to revise the theory radically, and yet that theory was what they regarded as their most important discovery.
It appeared that the theory could be saved in one way only.
If it could be shown that judgments of good and bad were not judgments at all, that they asserted nothing true or false, but merely expressed emotions like "Hurrah" or "Fiddlesticks", then these wayward judgments would cease from troubling and weary heads could be at rest.
This is the course the positivists took.
They explained value judgments by explaining them away.

Now I do not think their view will do.
But before discussing it, I should like to record one vote of thanks to them for the clarity with which they have stated their case.
It has been said of John Stuart Mill that he wrote so clearly that he could be found out.
This theory has been put so clearly and precisely that it deserves criticism of the same kind, and this I will do my best to supply.
The theory claims to show by analysis that when we say, "That is good", we do not mean to assert a character of the subject of which we are thinking.
I shall argue that we do mean to do just that.

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.

Consider what follows from the positivist view.
On that view, nothing good or bad happened in the case until I came on the scene and made my remark.
For what I express in my remark is something going on in me at the time, and that of course did not exist until I did come on the scene.
The pain of the rabbit was not itself bad;
nothing evil was happening when that pain was being endured;
badness, in the only sense in which it is involved at all, waited for its appearance till I came and looked and felt.
Now that this is at odds with our meaning may be shown as follows.
Let us put to ourselves the hypothesis that we had not come on the scene and that the rabbit never was discovered.
Are we prepared to say that in that case nothing bad occurred in the sense in which we said it did?
Clearly not.
Indeed, we should say, on the contrary, that the accident of our later discovery made no difference whatever to the badness of the animal's pain, that it would have been every whit as bad whether a chance passer-by happened later to discover the body and feel repugnance or not.
If so, then it is clear that in saying the suffering was bad we are not expressing our feelings only.
We are saying that the pain was bad when and as it occurred and before anyone took an attitude toward it.

The first argument is thus an ideal experiment in which we use the method of difference.
It removes our present expression and shows that the badness we meant would not be affected by this, whereas on positivist grounds it should be.
The second argument applies the method in the reverse way.
It ideally removes the past event, and shows that this would render false what we mean to say, whereas on positivist grounds it should not.
Let us suppose that the animal did not in fact fall into the trap and did not suffer at all, but that we mistakenly believe it did, and say as before that its suffering was an evil thing.
On the positivist theory, everything I sought to express by calling it evil in the first case is still present in the second.
In the only sense in which badness is involved at all, whatever was bad in the first case is still present in its entirety, since all that is expressed in either case is a state of feeling, and that feeling is still there.
And our question is, is such an implication consistent with what we meant?
Clearly it is not.
If anyone asked us, after we made the remark that the suffering was a bad thing, whether we should think it relevant to what we said to learn that the incident had never occurred and no pain had been suffered at all, we should say that it made all the difference in the world, that what we were asserting to be bad was precisely the suffering we thought had occurred back there, that if this had not occurred, there was nothing left to be bad, and that our assertion was in that case mistaken.
The suggestion that in saying something evil had occurred we were after all making no mistake, because we had never meant anyhow to say anything about the past suffering, seems to me merely frivolous.
If we did not mean to say this, why should we be so relieved on finding that the suffering had not occurred?
On the theory before us, such relief would be groundless, for in that suffering itself there was nothing bad at all, and hence in its nonoccurrence there would be nothing to be relieved about.
The positivist theory would here distort our meaning beyond recognition.

So far as I can see, there is only one way out for the positivist.
He holds that goodness and badness lie in feelings of approval or disapproval.
And there is a way in which he might hold that badness did in this case precede our own feeling of disapproval without belonging to the pain itself.
The pain in itself was neutral;
but unfortunately the rabbit, on no grounds at all, took up toward this neutral object an attitude of disapproval and that made it for the first time, and in the only intelligible sense, bad.
This way of escape is theoretically possible, but since it has grave difficulties of its own and has not, so far as I know, been urged by positivists, it is perhaps best not to spend time over it.

I come now to a third argument, which again is very simple.
When we come upon the rabbit and make our remark about its suffering being a bad thing, we presumably make it with some feeling;
the positivists are plainly right in saying that such remarks do usually express feeling.
But suppose that a week later we revert to the incident in thought and make our statement again.
And suppose that the circumstances have now so changed that the feeling with which we made the remark in the first place has faded.
The pathetic evidence is no longer before us;
and we are now so fatigued in body and mind that feeling is, as we say, quite dead.
In these circumstances, since what was expressed by the remark when first made is, on the theory before us, simply absent, the remark now expresses nothing.
It is as empty as the word "Hurrah" would be when there was no enthusiasm behind it.
And this seems to me untrue.
When we repeat the remark that such suffering was a bad thing, the feeling with which we made it last week may be at or near the vanishing point, but if we were asked whether we meant to say what we did before, we should certainly answer Yes.
We should say that we made our point with feeling the first time and little or no feeling the second time, but that it was the same point we were making.
And if we can see that what we meant to say remains the same, while the feeling varies from intensity to near zero, it is not the feeling that we primarily meant to express.

I come now to a fourth consideration.
We all believe that toward acts or effects of a certain kind one attitude is fitting and another not;
but on the theory before us such a belief would not make sense.
Broad and Ross have lately contended that this fitness is one of the main facts of ethics, and I suspect they are right.
But that is not exactly my point.
My point is this: whether there is such fitness or not, we all assume that there is, and if we do, we express in moral judgments more than the subjectivists say we do.
Let me illustrate.

In his novel The House Of The Dead, Dostoevsky tells of his experiences in a Siberian prison camp.
Whatever the unhappy inmates of such camps are like today, Dostoevsky's companions were about as grim a lot as can be imagined.
"I have heard stories", he writes, "of the most terrible, the most unnatural actions, of the most monstrous murders, told with the most spontaneous, childishly merry laughter".
Most of us would say that in this delight at the killing of others or the causing of suffering there is something very unfitting.
If we were asked why we thought so, we should say that these things involve great evil and are wrong, and that to take delight in what is evil or wrong is plainly unfitting.
Now on the subjectivist view, this answer is ruled out.
For before someone takes up an attitude toward death, suffering, or their infliction, they have no moral quality at all.
There is therefore nothing about them to which an attitude of approval or condemnation could be fitting.
They are in themselves neutral, and, so far as they get a moral quality, they get it only through being invested with it by the attitude of the onlooker.
But if that is true, why is any attitude more fitting than any other?
Would applause, for example, be fitting if, apart from the applause, there were nothing good to applaud?
Would condemnation be fitting if, independently of the condemnation, there were nothing bad to condemn?
In such a case, any attitude would be as fitting or unfitting as any other, which means that the notion of fitness has lost all point.

Indeed, we are forced to go much farther.
If goodness and badness lie in attitudes only and hence are brought into being by them, those men who greeted death and misery with childishly merry laughter are taking the only sensible line.
If there is nothing evil in these things, if they get their moral complexion only from our feeling about them, why shouldn't they be greeted with a cheer?
To greet them with repulsion would turn what before was neutral into something bad;
it would needlessly bring badness into the world;
and even on subjectivist assumptions that does not seem very bright.
On the other hand, to greet them with delight would convert what before was neutral into something good;
it would bring goodness into the world.