The prevalence of the term ‘utility’ peaked in English-language books right around the time of the publication of After Virtue, followed by a steep decline. Meanwhile, use of the term ‘happiness’, having peaked in 1800, reversed a long subsequent decline at the same time. And ‘eudaimonia’ witnessed an exponential rise starting in 1976, at a rate of increase that remains unabated up until the present. After Virtue, in articulating a powerful Aristotelian challenge to utilitarianism, played an important role in these developments. This was not, however, by way of contributing to technical discussions amongst scholars of Aristotle. Rather, After Virtue mediated to a much broader audience the sense that the ills of capitalist individualism were due to a loss of moral articulacy bound up with deep confusion about happiness. This chapter will unpack the connections between MacIntyre’s retrieval of Aristotelian eudaimonia and his Marxism, trace the influence of MacIntyre’s accounts of happiness and eudaimonia in After Virtue on subsequent philosophical, theological and psychological discussion and consider its present trajectory.

Two overarching and interrelated features of the Reformation period help to bring the variegated landscape of Reformation ethics and moral theology into focus. The first is a common emphasis on a fuller Christianization of the entire population, not simply of clerics and monastics, and hence on the importance of lay religious instruction and formation. Initially pursued in the hope of reform and renewal of the Church Universal, as Reformation divisions hardened the focus turned to competitive confessionalization. The second is a sense of cultural crisis; the drive for reform emerged not primarily out of a sense of optimism and capacity, but rather out of a sense of crisis, as a response to a perceived falling away from the divinely ordained social order. Reformers of various camps parted ways over whether the Christianization of society required doctrinal and institutional reforms or simply better education and formation, and over whether new religious movements represented heightened disorder or a move toward restored order.

In the mid to late twentieth century, it was the norm for Protestant thinkers to reject natural law ethics. Karl Barth repudiated natural law as insufficiently Christocentric. Reinhold Niebuhr criticised natural law thinking for absolutising the relative. Stanley Hauerwas argued that ‘natural law functions ideologically to justify the assumption that Christians have a responsibility to fulfil the demands of the state and institutions associated with it’, thereby compromising loyalty to Christ. Natural law was regarded as an essentially Catholic approach to Christian moral thinking. It seemed to constrain divine freedom, deny the radical character of the Fall, render scripture secondary and interfere with the intimacy of the divine–human relation. The Reformers, as the story had it, embraced divine command morality, not natural law. Even if there were a natural law embodying God’s will for creation, the Fall rendered access to that law impossible.

Voluntarism and antivoluntarism – radical alternatives?

One of the central themes woven through J. B. Schneewind's The Invention of Autonomy is that of community with God. Schneewind draws on the notion of community with God in order vividly to capture what was at stake between voluntarists and antivoluntarists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; voluntarists denied that God and human beings are members of the same moral community, while antivoluntarists insisted that God and humans must share membership in this community. In effect, voluntarists held that God, to be God, must be sovereign and free, while antivoluntarists retorted that God must for the same reason instead be loving and just. It was antivoluntarism that won, historically speaking, the day, since most people found an arbitrary tyrant as God unacceptable. But antivoluntarism had difficulty retaining a substantial role for God within human morality, and, ironically, the dedicated efforts of antivoluntarists to defend God's moral character gave rise to forms of moral philosophy that marginalized or eliminated God's role altogether: intuitionism, utilitarianism and Kantianism.

The point of departure for this essay is a nagging suspicion that the range of options represented within modern moral thought was in fact rather limited. I wish to raise the possibility of a third alternative alongside affirming or denying moral community with God, to ask if the affirmation and the denial of moral community with God were perhaps not radical alternatives to one another, but rather had in common a certain framework for thinking of God's transcendence that in fact undermined that transcendence.