CS Lewis The Abolition Of Man

Essay, Research Paper

C.S. The Abolition of Man

While reading The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, I encountered a few questions concerning his view on Ethical Innovation and the dilemma conditioners face. It was a difficult book with many ideas that didn t come completely clear to me at times.

I agree with Lewis theory that ethical innovation is impossible. Everything we base ourselves on according to rational thought, morals, ethics, what is right and wrong, has been passed down to us in every kind of information from oratory to internet. We have not come up with a new creative idea of how to act in ethics. You don t read in a screaming headline, NEW WAY TO BE ETHICAL. We have just acquired the way to act through the way mankind has evolved. Maybe if we live around the beginning then we might be able to be innovative but human nature contains all types of reasoning in which the way we act. We all are different in many ways but we all know the ways we could be also. We observe others and know what kind of character, personality, values and some of them we copy from them. We are not being innovative but adaptive of thought. We look at others and sometimes act accordingly to their nature. We all have a personalized nature but we tend to identify and be changeable to other ways besides your own. I can relate to Lewis idea of science and magic to what ethical innovators are really doing. Magic is something that happens that is impossible much like the innovation of ethics. Just like there is no innovation for ethics then there is none for science. My idea is that everything is already created, we just have to find it. How many times have you thought about some cool thing that you could make and would be useful in some way? Of course you probably never attempt doing it but the idea is there. Not necessarily created by you but by something else that made you think about it. We are not really original in thought.

Conditioners are the motivators which set the aspect of how we should be. The difficulty for the conditioners, which have been brought to surface by us, is what motivated them. They things that happen and they get perceived as good or bad. But how can something be categorized as good or bad? It is analogous to a scientific experiment that gets played around with until the conclusion comes out with a solution that seems to work. Now do we stop when one seems to work because as science evolves with different solutions, shoud not our conditioners evolve also? Why do we have to base everything from the beginning of man to put something as good or bad? The Conditioner must be amoral because it can t have a position if it isn t motivated. We make the decision of what is moral l or not. The conditioner happens because we bring it on and is difficult to say what is goo d or bad when we can be explained by our actions as human nature. Conditioners are defined by us as moral or not but begin as amoral. Also, there are multiple endings and ways of concluding a situation that is considered a good action. What ending do we choose for the best result? If we can be shaped by a repeating factor that seems right to most of the people, then is it right, moral, justice, etc? Does everyone have to agree in unison to something for it to be right? Is our government and education system right?