 As we have seen, Shaftesbury also argues that belief in voluntarism has significantly deleterious moral effects. If you believe certain actions are wrong only because God arbitrarily commands you not to perform them, then your overwhelming reason for not performing those actions will be the self-interested desire to avoid God’s punishment. But if that self-interested desire becomes your overwhelming motivation, it will crowd out and eventually destroy the other-loving motives that are essential to your own virtue and happiness (C 2.55–6, 2.58–9; see also 1.97, 2.48–50, 2.267).