Which 1943 C.S. Lewis book argues that moral education must protect objective values?

The Abolition of Man is C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book arguing for objective moral values.

Lewis developed the book from three lectures delivered at the University of Durham in February 1943. He criticized an approach to language and education that treated moral judgments as merely expressions of emotion. In his view, education should not train students to dismiss inherited moral principles as subjective reactions.

The book uses the traditional term Tao for a cross-cultural system of basic moral intuitions. Lewis argued that societies may express these principles differently while still recognizing recurring ideas such as justice, honesty, and respect for human life.

The title refers not simply to political oppression but to the possibility that scientific power and moral subjectivism could reduce human beings’ capacity for reasoned choice. Readers sometimes confuse this book with Lewis’s fiction That Hideous Strength, which dramatizes related concerns about technocracy and social control.