  Although persons or states of persons are the bearers of intrinsic value, they have their value in virtue of having other properties. McTaggart was an ethical pluralist, granting that many different sorts of properties can contribute to the value of a state of a person. Pleasure and pain are both intrinsically valuable (the latter having negative value, of course), and both are present in timeless reality. Pain is always intrinsically bad, regardless of whether the recipient of the pain deserves to be in pain. On the basis of this claim, McTaggart argued against the justifiability of vindictive punishment. (See Some Dogmas of Religion, section 133, as well as “Hegel’s Theory of Punishment”, which further develops this view; chapter five of Studies in Hegelian Cosmology is devoted to a discussion of punishment.) And unfortunately, delusory perceptions, of which we are susceptible, are intrinsically bad. For this reason, McTaggart concludes that absolute reality is not free from intrinsic disvalue. (Even if pain is illusory, the illusion that there is pain is real, and is itself bad. See his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, page 155.) For this reason, Hegel’s attempts to prove that the absolute is perfect are doomed to  failure.[39]