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Abolition of Man part 2 The Way summary by Benjamin McLean C. S. Lewiss The Abolition of Man is divided into three parts. Part 1: Men Without Chests deals with the present.

Part 2: The Way deals with the pastPart 3: The Abolition of Man deals with the future.Appendix: examples of the Tao In part one, we established what Lewis meant by the Tao - he co-opted the term to stand for the world of traditional moral values universal to all major cultures as opposed to the world of moral relativism or ethical subjectivism in modern philosophy. He spends most of part 2 brutallyhacking away at every conceivable alternative system of values. He shows that under theprocedure used to debunk the Tao, all these other systems can also be debunked - that thisprocess of debunking the Tao debunks itself. The main objections covered are progressivism,utilitarianism and instinct-based ethics. He opens by pointing out that people who object to the Tao almost always have some valuesystem of their own that they are trying to substitute for it. But all of these systems fall apart onexamination for unless they admit that certain things really are intrinsically good in themselvesas the traditionalists maintain, they ultimately fail to adequately define the summum bonum.(greatest good or ultiamte end) They have some arbitrary goal in mind that they regard asmore necessary or progressive or efficient. but they cannot adequately answer thequestions, Necessary for what?, Progressing towards what?, Effecting what? and why thegoals given in those answers are desirable, and why those desires are desirable, ad infinitum.The Tao maintains that certain states of affairs are in and of themselves, intrinsically meritorious

and so doesnt fall prey to the error of an infinite regress of justifications. The traditional moral teachers agree with the utilitarians that self-sacrifice is sometimes requiredfor the good of all. (Ayn Rand hated this part) But why should we, personally, be the onesselected out of the group to make the necessary sacrifice or take the necessary risk? If thereis nothing intrinsically noble, such as found in the Tao, we can always invent excuses andarguments to push the responsibility onto someone else. Utilitarianism fails because it is awholly social ethic and lacks the essential component of personal obligation. Instinct-based ethics means the idea that our moral values are derived simply from our animalinstincts. Do our animal instincts make our morality? This idea would suggest that our moralprinciples (or inherited taboos) are simply a rationalization of our herd instinct evolved as asurvival mechanism for social animals. So its not intrinsically wrong to randomly stab other people in the face for no reason, but only wrong because we have an instinct that tells us not todo it. But heres the problem: Ethics is not about telling us what we actually, in fact, do. That wouldbe the job of behavioral psychology and philosophical anthropology. Ethics is about telling us

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what we ought to do, what we should do, should have done, ought to have done and ought tobe doing. Basing our ethics on instinct doesnt make sense because telling us to obey instinct islike telling us to obey people in general. People say different things. So do instincts. There isno single, monolithic, instinct that we must obey. Our instincts are at war with one another.

There isnt a single one of our instinctive impulses which would not claim to be gratified at theexpense of all the rest. Any one of our instincts, if made ruler and master of all the others, wouldmake us all into devils and tyrants. In reality, we find that we must control and even suppresseach of our instincts at certain times, and encourage them at other times. We must controland suppress our fighting instinct when someone has said something that makes us angry toavoid hitting them, but we must encourage our fighting instinct when we are in military combatand are in need of courage to win a battle. We must encourage our parental instincts when wehave a baby to take care of, and suppress them when the child is grown and needs to becomeindependent. In the case of each instinct, there are times to encourage it and times to suppressit, and we cannot appeal to our instincts to tell us which instincts we ought to obey. They will allclamour for us to pursue mutually contradictory courses of action. Can these objectors maintainthat there is an instinct of a higher order directing us in which instincts to obey, and yet another higher one directing us to obey it, and so on to infinity? This is absurd, impossible and bears noresemblance to our actual moral experience. An analogy is given that our instincts are like the keys on a piano. Musicians know that pianosdont come with two kinds of notes, being the right notes and the wrong notes. Every note onthe piano is right at certain times and wrong at certain other times. Ethical systems are meantto give us a tune to play on the keys of instinct. They must provide us with a separate thingthat is not itself an instinct which enables us to know which instincts to encourage and which todiscourage in different situations. A sheet of music which tells us which keys to press in what

order cannot itself be one of the keys. Ethics cannot be derived from instinct. Every attempt todo so conceals a judgement which is passed upon our instincts and is not derivable from them. Lewis concludes that the Tao is the sole source of all value judgements by showing that allattempts to attack the Tao in deference to some other set of value judgements depend on theTao for such validity as they posses. He doesnt say it directly but its 1943 and hes addressingNazism as a prime example of this fallacy. He expands on this philosophy in, The GreatDivorce among other places, asserting that nothing is intrinsically, ontologically evil but that allevil comes from something good that has been spoiled, twisted or corrupted somehow. Theres one more important point in here that weve got to cover and that is Lewiss answer to the question of how there could be any moral progress if traditional moral values (what hecalls the world of the Tao) are timeless, constant and unchanging. He distinguishes betweentwo different types of change, writing, There is a difference between a real moral advanceand a mere innovation. From the Confucian 'Do not do to others what you would not like themto do to you' to the Christian 'Do as you would be done by' is a real advance. The morality of Nietzsche is a mere innovation. The first is an advance because no one who did not admit thevalidity of the old maxim could see reason for accepting the new one, and anyone who accepted

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the old would at once recognize the new as an extension of the same principle. If he rejected it,he would have to reject it as a superfluity, something that went too far, not as something simplyheterogeneous from his own ideas of value. But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a positionwhere we can find no ground for any value judgements at all. It is the difference between a man

who says to us: 'You like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own and havethem perfectly fresh?' and a man who says, 'Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks andcentipedes instead.' So going from the Confucian ethic of leaving other people alone to the Christian ethic of theGolden Rule is a real moral advance according to Lewis. Is going from Jesuss Golden Rule toKants Categorical Imperative an example of a real moral advance or a mere innovation? Thatsup to the reader to figure out. Lewis describes the sorts of objectors covered here in part two as, half-hearted sceptics whostill hope to find 'real' values when they have debunked the traditional ones. I think Jean-PaulSartre would have agreed with that description. Part three will address the much more seriouslydangerous, tough-minded philosophies that are prepared to accept the judgement of part twothat all systems of value fall when their roots in the Tao are cut and consequently reject allsystems of value.