Divine freedom and the choice of a world

1. A problem about God's freedom In his book Anselmian Explorations, Thomas Morris raises the question how God's freedom of will can be reconciled with His essential righteousness. 1 He provides an interesting and attractive solution to this problem, one which provides for divine freedom with respect to divine acts of supererogation. I shall argue that Morris' solution becomes considerably less attractive, however, if, as I hope to show, there is a maximally good world that God can create. In view of this result, I shall defend a different conception of divine freedom, according to which that freedom is compatible with God's acting as He does necessarily. That way of answering the difficulty posed by Morris will force a confrontation between two alternative ways of formulating the libertarian conception of free will, alternatives which are sometimes taken to be equivalent: first, that freedom involves being able to do otherwise, and second, that freedom involves the capacity to act from reasons one has. 2 Morris regards the first to be fundamental; I take the second to be so. In the case of God, the two conceptions of freedom come apart; so God provides a possibly unique case against which to test the two conceptions. If I am right, and the second conception is the more fundamental one then perhaps an analysis of what it is for God to be free can help us to see why. This second sort of account of God's free will, and of free will in general, has a long history. Versions of it can be found in Plato, Augustine, Anselm, Leibniz, and Hegel, among others. I shall have some things to say in the course of my remarks about the ontological commitments I believe such a conception requires. Morris, on the other hand, thinks that it is an essential and minimal part of any libertarian conception of freedom that an act is free only if the agent could have avoided performing it. Morris calls this condition the Principle of Avoidance (PA), and he formulates it thus: