 Thus wrote Russell in reply to critics who thought that his emotivism precluded him from being so relentlessly preachy. There was, they thought, some kind of pragmatic inconsistency between vehement moral opinions (frequently voiced) and meta-ethical emotivism (RoE: 145–150/Papers 11: 48–52). Russell makes short work of this. In his view the function of the words “good” and “bad” is to express certain kinds of desires. Since he had the relevant desires there was no inconsistency in his using “good” and “bad” to express the desires that they were designed to express. There is nothing inconsistent about using a piece of verbal machinery to do what you think it is designed to do.