A friend told me about a philosophical paper he read. The author of this paper claimed that moral truths are necessary. "If pain is bad", he said, "it is necessarily bad". I assume that something being necessary means that we cannot imagine a possible situation where it does not happen. But can we not imagine situations where pain wouldn't be morally bad? Imagine a planet whose inhabitants can feel pain only in very special situations (they have other kinds of suffering). They feel pain only when they communicate with each other. And causing pain is the only way they have to communicate with each other. Different kinds of pain work as words that they combine to build (painful) sentences. Would you say that pain is bad in such a planet? I guess we should say that causing pain without having something relevant to "say" is bad, but not that pain is bad in general. What do you think?