After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

by Michael Ward

To a thoroughgoing adherent of subjectivism, the value of a good death is invisible because power – self-assertive power – lies at the heart of that philosophy. Value is not an external reality that is recognised and then either praised or dispraised according to the lights of practical reason, but rather a conferral from one’s own irrational or nonrational nature (whatever that nature happens to be at any given moment). Truth thus dissolves into power,†† and the notion that self-sacrifice could ever be morally obligatory becomes absurd. Which is not to say that life will always be preferred over death. Self-immolation may be the choice du jour. But the choice to die will be made for no reason other than one’s momentary preference, not because one acknowledges it to be the good and right thing to do. The citation of Juvenal that we noted above (page 163) is worth recurring to here: “Hoc volo, sic jubeo; sit pro ratione voluntas” (“This I will, so I command; let my will take the place of reason”). Self-destruction is fully possible in a subjectivist world, even self-destruction that might accidentally redound to other people’s benefit, but reasoned self-sacrifice – a purposeful, generous, self-abandoned laying down of one’s life for the good of others as others – is impossible. As Robert Bolt puts it memorably in the screenplay of The Mission: “If might is right, then love has no place in the world.”19