Which 1943 C.S. Lewis book argues that morality needs an objective foundation?

The Abolition of Man is C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book arguing that morality requires an objective foundation.

The work began as three lectures delivered at the University of Durham in February 1943. Lewis criticized an approach to education that, in his view, treated value judgments as merely subjective emotional reactions. He argued that traditional moral principles express a shared order of human values.

The book develops its argument through the ideas of “the Tao,” Lewis’s term for a broad cross-cultural tradition of basic moral principles. He then considers what could happen if technological power were separated from any objective account of human nature and moral obligation.

The title does not mean that Lewis wanted humanity literally destroyed. It refers to the possible loss of human agency and moral judgment through the attempt to remake people according to arbitrary preferences. That argument distinguishes the book from The Problem of Pain, which addresses suffering and Christian belief.