What is the name of C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book about moral education and objective values?

C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book about moral education and objective values is The Abolition of Man. It developed from three lectures Lewis delivered at the University of Durham in 1943.

The book responds to what Lewis considered a dangerous tendency to treat value judgments as merely subjective emotional reactions. He argues that education should cultivate rightly ordered feelings and that moral traditions across cultures contain recognizable principles. He calls this shared moral order the Tao, using a Chinese term more broadly than its original religious contexts.

Lewis’s argument is not a defense of one narrow school subject or a simple rejection of science. Instead, he warns that technological power without moral formation could reduce human beings to objects shaped by other human wills. The final chapter connects this danger to the possibility of humanity attempting to remake itself.

The title does not mean that people will literally disappear. “Abolition” describes the loss of qualities traditionally associated with human nature if moral judgment is discarded.