GROUND: THE ABOLITION OF MAN

 # GROUND: THE ABOLITION OF MAN

C.S. Lewis's *The Abolition of Man* achieves **perfect alignment** across all six of Sterling's philosophical commitments. This slender volume doesn't merely agree with Sterling's framework—it **actively defends** each commitment against its most sophisticated modern opponents, demonstrating how denying any one leads inevitably to nihilism and the destruction of humanity itself.

---

## **I. MORAL REALISM ✓✓✓: The Tao as Objective Moral Law**

**Perfect Alignment: Objective moral truth exists independently of human opinion**

Lewis defends moral realism with uncompromising clarity. The Tao (his term for the objective moral law) is **not a human construction** but the fundamental structure of value that all civilizations have recognized.

**The Core Argument:**

- Cross-cultural convergence proves objectivity (Appendix: "Illustrations of the Tao")

- Every civilization recognizes: special duties to benefactors, justice, good faith, mercy, magnanimity

- This isn't coincidence—it's **discovery of reality**, like different cultures discovering mathematics

**Against Subjectivism:**

Lewis demolishes the view that values are mere sentiment or social construction. The debunkers claim to "see through" all values, but this is self-refuting:

*"You cannot go on 'seeing through' things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it... If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see."*

**Why This Is Perfect for Sterling:**

When Sterling declares "virtue is objectively good," he's affirming what Lewis calls the Tao. This isn't cultural bias—it's rational recognition of mind-independent moral structure. The denial of moral realism doesn't lead to liberation but to **abolition**—the destruction of objective value and ultimately of man himself.

*Key Quote:* "The Tao admits no development or correction... What purport to be new systems or ideologies... are merely fragments of the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context."

---

## **II. ETHICAL INTUITIONISM ✓✓✓: Direct Rational Apprehension of Moral Truth**

**Perfect Alignment: Moral truths known immediately through reason, not derived from non-moral facts**

Lewis explicitly defends ethical intuitionism against attempts to derive values from instinct, evolution, or utility. Moral first principles are **self-evident to practical reason**—they cannot be and need not be proved from something more fundamental.

**The Is-Ought Gap:**

Lewis shows rigorously that moral conclusions cannot be derived from non-moral premises:

*"From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation."*

**The Foundation Problem:**

You cannot justify the Tao by appeal to anything outside it without circularity:

- Appeal to instinct? Which instinct, and why follow it? (requires moral premise)

- Appeal to survival? Why should we survive? (requires moral premise)  

- Appeal to happiness? Why is happiness good? (requires moral premise)

**Why This Is Perfect for Sterling:**

Sterling's students don't *deduce* that virtue matters from empirical observations. They **directly apprehend** this truth through practical reason—what Lewis calls recognizing the Tao. Training removes obstacles (false beliefs, disordered desires) that cloud this natural moral vision.

*Key Quote:* "The Innovator attacks traditional values... but he can validate his own position only by an appeal to some traditional value. He must claim that what he calls progress is the movement from a less to a more valuable state of affairs. But this involves the acceptance of some value which is not itself subject to progress."

---

## **III. SUBSTANCE DUALISM ✓✓✓: Reason Distinct from Nature**

**Perfect Alignment: The rational soul transcends material nature**

Lewis defends substance dualism implicitly throughout but explicitly in his discussion of Reason and Nature. The **rational faculty cannot be reduced** to natural (physical/biological) processes without self-refutation.

**The Argument from Reason:**

If reasoning is merely the result of non-rational causes (brain chemistry, evolution, conditioning), then we have no reason to trust reasoning—including the reasoning that led to naturalism:

*"If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees."*

**Men Without Chests:**

Lewis's famous image of "men without chests" depicts the disaster of denying dualism. The "chest" (spirited element, thymos) mediates between reason and appetite. Modern education that reduces humans to intellect + instinct **destroys the human being**:

*"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."*

**Why This Is Perfect for Sterling:**

Sterling's claim that "you are your rational faculty, not your body" is precisely Lewis's position. The rational soul is categorically distinct from bodily processes. Emotions, appetites, physical sensations—these are **natural** processes that reason must govern. Denying this distinction abolishes the possibility of rational self-governance.

*Key Quote:* "The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat... of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest—Magnanimity—Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man."

---

## **IV. LIBERTARIAN FREE WILL ✓✓✓: Genuine Moral Agency**

**Perfect Alignment: Real choice essential to humanity**

Lewis's entire argument presupposes **genuine agency**. The threat of "the Abolition of Man" is precisely the elimination of authentic human choice through conditioning by "Controllers" who themselves have no rational basis for their control.

**The Conditioners' Dilemma:**

If values are subjective, the Conditioners who shape future humans have no rational basis for their choices. They can only impose arbitrary preferences or follow their own non-rational impulses. But this means **no genuine moral agency remains**:

*"If any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them."*

**The Alternative:**

Genuine moral education respects the student's freedom to recognize and align with objective values. It's not conditioning but **awakening**—helping rational beings apprehend what's truly there.

**Why This Is Perfect for Sterling:**

Sterling's system depends absolutely on libertarian free will. We genuinely control our assent to impressions, our value judgments, our character formation. Lewis shows that denying this freedom doesn't liberate us—it **abolishes us** as moral agents, reducing us to artifacts shaped by forces that themselves have no rational justification.

*Key Quote:* "Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man."

---

## **V. FOUNDATIONALISM ✓✓✓: The Tao as Axiomatic**

**Perfect Alignment: Moral reasoning proceeds from self-evident first principles**

Lewis explicitly defends foundationalism. The Tao is **axiomatic**—it cannot be justified by anything more fundamental without circularity, and it needs no such justification because its first principles are self-evident to practical reason.

**The Structure of Justification:**

- The Tao is the **axiom**, not a theorem

- All moral reasoning proceeds from it

- Attempts to prove it beg the question or reduce to fragments of the Tao itself

- To reject it is to reject the possibility of moral reasoning entirely

**Against Infinite Regress:**

You must stand *somewhere* to reason at all. The demand for justification of first principles leads either to vicious regress or to non-moral foundations (which can't ground moral conclusions per the is-ought gap):

*"The Innovator... must claim that what he calls progress is the movement from a less to a more valuable state of affairs. But this involves the acceptance of some value which is not itself subject to progress... Thus the very possibility of any progress at all depends on the Tao."*

**Why This Is Perfect for Sterling:**

Sterling's confidence in systematic training rests on foundationalist epistemology. We begin with self-evident truths (virtue is the only genuine good, we control our assent, externals are indifferent) and derive a complete system. Lewis proves this methodology is rationally necessary—the only alternative is nihilism.

*Key Quote:* "The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves."

---

## **VI. CORRESPONDENCE THEORY ✓✓✓: Moral Judgments Can Be True or False**

**Perfect Alignment: Moral claims correspond to objective moral reality**

Lewis treats moral language as **genuinely cognitive**—moral judgments can be objectively true or false based on whether they correspond to the structure of the Tao.

**Truth in Ethics:**

When someone says "This is good" or "That is wrong," they're making claims about reality that can be correct or mistaken:

*"The practical reason... must judge, and know the facts in question, and that means it must know or intuit the principles of practical reason, which connect the factual with the moral."*

**Error as Misalignment:**

False moral beliefs don't just fail to be useful—they **fail to correspond** to moral reality. The "Innovators" who reject traditional values aren't just different; they're **mistaken**:

*"A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery."*

**Why This Is Perfect for Sterling:**

When Sterling corrects "false value beliefs," he's applying correspondence theory to ethics. The judgment "wealth will make me happy" is **objectively false**—it doesn't correspond to the way rational nature actually relates to externals. Right judgments match the structure of the Tao itself.

*Key Quote:* "The practical conclusions of the Innovators are really independent of and even incompatible with the theoretical premises from which they arise."

---

## **THE INTEGRATED DEFENSE: How Lewis Proves All Six Must Stand Together**

What makes *The Abolition of Man* perfect for Sterling isn't just affirmation—it's **systematic defense showing mutual necessity**:

**Deny MORAL REALISM** → No objective standard remains → Values become mere sentiment

↓

**Deny ETHICAL INTUITIONISM** → Must derive values from non-values → Is-ought gap (impossible)

↓

**Deny CORRESPONDENCE THEORY** → Moral claims not truth-apt → No right/wrong answers

↓

**Deny FOUNDATIONALISM** → Infinite regress or arbitrary stopping point → No justified beliefs

↓

**Deny SUBSTANCE DUALISM** → Reason reduced to nature → Self-refuting naturalism

↓

**Deny LIBERTARIAN FREE WILL** → No genuine choice → Controllers and controlled, not moral agents

**The result:** Not mere error but **the Abolition of Man**—the destruction of humanity as moral agents capable of recognizing and conforming to objective value.

---

## **WHY THIS IS PERFECT ALIGNMENT**

*The Abolition of Man* achieves what few philosophical works accomplish:

1. **Explicit defense** of all six commitments against modern opponents

2. **Demonstration of necessity**—showing how denying any one collapses the system

3. **Negative proof**—the alternative to Sterling's framework is nihilism and abolition

4. **Practical urgency**—this isn't academic; it's the survival of humanity itself

5. **Accessible clarity**—written for general readers but philosophically rigorous

**For Sterling's framework, Lewis provides:**

- Confirmation that these commitments form a coherent, necessary system

- Defense against the most sophisticated modern objections

- Proof that the stakes are ultimate—accept this framework or lose humanity itself

- Cross-cultural validation (the Appendix) showing universal recognition of the Tao

*The Abolition of Man* is perfect alignment because it shows that **Sterling's six commitments aren't optional philosophical preferences—they're the necessary conditions for remaining human at all**.

**Perfect alignment. Perfect defense. Perfect demonstration of what's at stake.**