C.S. Lewis on the Ethics of Technology I Prof. Thomas Ward

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Prof. Thomas Ward explores C. S. Lewis’s "The Abolition of Man", analyzing how technology’s conquest of nature risks diminishing humanity unless anchored by objective moral values.

This lecture was given on April 8th, 2025, at Indiana University.

Secular campuses are being transformed, but the students need your help! Your gift before September fifteenth can launch a new TI chapter and change lives. Visit thomisticinstitute.org/bts25podcast to give today!

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Thomas M. Ward is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin, in the School of Civic Leadership. He specializes in the history of philosophy and theology of the Middle Ages. Ward is the author of After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher (Word on Fire, 2024), Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus (Angelico, 2022), Divine Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and has translated, with commentary, John Duns Scotus’s Treatise on the First Principle (Hackett, 2024). He has been a NEH Fellow (2022) and Harvey Fellow (2009-2011), and is a past winner of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy Founder's Award (2013) and the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Rising Scholar Essay Contest (2018). He studied philosophy at Biola University (BA 2004) and theology at Oxford University (M.Phil 2006), where he was Head Resident at the Kilns, the former residence of C.S. Lewis. His PhD in philosophy is from UCLA (2011). Ward is married with six children and is a member of St. Peter Catholic Student Center in Waco.

Keywords: Abolition of Man, Artificial Contraception, Catholicism, C. S. Lewis, Eugenics, Ethics of Technology, Incarnation, Posthumanism, Practical Reasoning, Virtue Ethics

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Secular campuses are being transformed, but the students need your help.
0:03.8	Last year, students at 41 secular universities asked to start TI chapters.
0:08.8	Only 10 can be funded. The rest are still waiting.
0:11.9	Please, give a student a yes they've been praying for.
0:15.0	They're ready, but they can't share the truth without you.
0:18.0	Your gift before September 15th can launch a new TI chapter and change lives.
0:23.0	Go to temisticinstitute.org slash donate or use the link in this episode to give today.
0:31.6	Welcome to the Timistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual
0:36.8	tradition in the university,
0:38.5	the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university
0:43.7	students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events,
0:49.5	visit us at to mystic institute.org. But tonight, we're not going to be talking very much about St. Thomas.
0:57.2	Right at the end, I'll squeeze a little bit in if there's time.
1:02.0	But it's certainly in the vicinity of things that St. Thomas would care about and value.
1:16.6	C.S. Lewis is the main thinker that we'll be considering tonight, as the title suggests. And when I talk about ethics of technology, the emphasis for me is on the ethics side.
1:23.6	And that's mostly because of my own training. I'm not a technologist. I'm not a techie person.
1:32.2	I won't be able to give you very specific insights into specific kinds of technology. There are
1:38.9	questions about, say, medical ethics or engineering ethics, that I think that one would actually need
1:48.8	quite a bit of subject-specific knowledge
1:51.3	to make really insightful claims
1:53.7	or answer really hard questions
1:55.4	within certain subfields of tech ethics.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.