Which C.S. Lewis book argues for an objective moral law called the Tao?

The Abolition of Man argues for an objective moral law that C.S. Lewis calls the Tao. The book developed from three lectures delivered at the University of Durham in 1943 and was published that same year.

Lewis uses “the Tao” as a broad term for traditional moral principles shared across cultures and religious traditions. He argues that education should not reduce value judgments to mere emotional reactions, because doing so would undermine the basis of human morality.

The work is not a book about Chinese philosophy alone. Lewis borrowed the term to describe a universal moral framework, while citing examples from multiple civilizations. Its three chapters examine modern education, moral subjectivism, and the consequences Lewis believed would follow from rejecting objective values.

The title refers to the reduction of humanity into beings controlled by technological power and arbitrary preferences. It remains one of Lewis’s most discussed works of moral philosophy.