The thing about value judgments is just that.
I mean:
Why is your need to keep something that is “yours” greater than my need to take it?
Why is your desire to live more valid than my desire to kill?
I could do a thousand more examples.
Of course, it sounds ridiculous: It is.
But that’s the point.
Without “Tao” – you do not even have a foundation to speak about ethics from.
This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess.
-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man (Amazon)
