ABSTRACT
A feature shared by different versions of theological voluntarism is the assumption that God’s will is crucial to determining the moral status of at least some classes of entities, such as states of affairs or acts. This chapter focuses on the account of the German philosopher and theologian Christian August Crusius (1715–1775). Sonja Schierbaum argues that Crusius’s view can be attractive for theists who seek to avoid a difficulty of theological voluntarism while being committed to two of its central claims, namely, the dependence of the very existence of moral obligation on God’s acts of will and his authority to hold us accountable. The difficulty is that theological voluntarism seems inadequately motivated, since it is unclear how the two central claims are connected. Schierbaum argues that Crusius offers an account of moral obligation that is founded entirely on necessary divine acts, on the basis of which it is possible to explain how these two claims are connected. However, this explanation comes at the price of being incompatible with a strictly voluntarist conception of divine freedom.
