  The argument is valid. But if the entire meaning of ‘tormenting the cat is bad’ in the second premise is well explained by saying that it is suited for use in expressing disapproval of tormenting the cat, then that meaning cannot be the same as the meaning it has in the first premise (which one might accept even if one approves of tormenting cats). This doesn’t show that the expression is not being used emotively in the second premise; a descriptivist can agree to that. But it does indicate that more will need to be said to explain what is going on. For straightforwardly descriptive arguments of the same form, the explanation of why the argument is valid relies on the idea that the phrase in the antecedent has a constant meaning that it represents both unembedded and embedded. This is what Geach has called The Frege Point: “A thought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition” (Geach 1965, 449). As Geach saw it, we need to think of predication as constant across embedded and unembedded occurrences of predicative moral sentences so as not to commit a fallacy of equivocation in making arguments. (It is due to Geach’s invocation of Frege in this context that the embedding problem is often called the Frege-Geach problem.  Searle 1962 independently raises a version of the same objection and some credit W. D. Ross (1939, 34–38) with an earlier yet statement of the objection.)