C.S. Lewis on Objective Value and Men Without Chests

Caleb explains that Lewis's pseudonymous Green Book authors treat the statement that a waterfall is sublime as merely a report of the speaker's feelings rather than a claim about the waterfall itself. Lewis sees this subjectivism as a substantive metaethical position being smuggled into an ordinary English textbook, with no argument given for it. This matters because it removes the possibility of genuinely debating or correcting value judgments.

Michael connects the Green Book's position to emotivism, the 'boo-hooray' theory that value claims just express approval or disapproval, and to expressivism, the view that calling something sublime expresses an internal feeling rather than describing the world. He notes these theories were emerging in academic philosophy around the same time Lewis was writing, and treats the textbook's stance as a popularized version of them.

Caleb draws a parallel to the fact-versus-opinion distinction taught in schools, where facts are measurable and provable while opinions, including moral and aesthetic judgments, are treated as mere personal beliefs. He argues this framing implies both that value judgments cannot be adjudicated and that they are less important than factual claims, a double upshot Lewis is worried about.

Caleb and Michael present Lewis's appeal to Augustine's definition of virtue as ordo amoris, the right ordering of one's loves, and Aristotle's claim that education aims to make a pupil like and dislike what he ought. They connect this to Epictetus's opening lines of the Handbook on desire and aversion, arguing that a central task of philosophy as a way of life is training emotional responses, not just reasoning correctly.

Caleb reads Lewis's account of the Tao, or the Way, as the idea, found in Confucianism, Judaism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Christianity, that there is an objective reality that grounds value judgments. Michael observes that Lewis deliberately avoids making this a partisan Christian argument, instead treating the convergence across traditions as evidence for objective value.

Drawing on Lewis's reading of Plato, Caleb and Michael describe the tripartite picture of reason, appetite, and the spirited 'chest' that links them through trained emotional habits. They discuss Lewis's example that sentimental attachment to a flag or country, not syllogisms, keeps soldiers at their posts under bombardment, arguing that a purely intellectual life is not sufficient for sustained right action.

Michael quotes Lewis's description of the products of this miseducation as 'men without chests,' people wrongly called intellectuals who are not distinguished by any special skill at finding truth but by an atrophied capacity for generous emotion. The point is that a love of truth itself requires sentiment, so debunking all sentiment undermines the very intellectual virtues these people are praised for.

Michael notes that Lewis's claim that the heart never takes the place of the head, but it can and should obey it, treats emotions as distinct from judgments that can be brought into harmony with reason, a broadly Platonic or Aristotelian view. He points out this differs from the Stoic position, which holds that emotions themselves are a kind of judgment rather than a separate faculty to be trained alongside the intellect.