You’re still mixing up philosophical free will with the every day conception of free will. Philosophy asks whether there is such a thing as free will or not. For the purposes of any day-to-day debate about volunteering everyone assumes there is such a thing as free will. When you talk about ‘mandated volunteering’ you are not talking about free will in the philosophical sense; that is about relations between individuals, institutions etc. If it is a philosophical debate at all it is one of political philosophy.

Indeed, you say yourself, “I suspect this view of determinism (though fascinating) doesn’t have
much to say about the kinds of issues we’re interested in with
volunteering”. You’re right, because that view is part of a debate that is about things as they really are, ie the nature of reality. The debate you want to have, in contrast, has to be based on an acceptance of the idea that people can choose to do things, because that debate takes place inside the parameters of a particular conception of reality.

Anther example of a philosophical debate that is similarly not entered into for the purposes of a conversation about something in the everyday world is, do physical things exist? That is, you can’t have a debate about volunteering without assuming that the physical world exists, that it is not a figment of my imagination etc.

My point is, whilst it is good to learn from other fields, you can’t mix up debates about things in the world with debates about the ontology of the world, because the former have to assume certain things about the latter. You’d be much better off reading and bringing to bear some political, sociological and ethical theory. For example:

* does it matter if people do volunteering for altruistic or selfish reasons if the outcomes are the same?
* does volunteering strengthen capitalism by allowing those with more to get away with doing less?
* is volunteering an example of, or does it increase, the social imbalance of power?
* is volunteering an inherently ‘good’ activity?
* is volunteering a middle class luxury?

**********

Again, I have to repeate: compatibilists are not determinists, which is why they are called compatibilists, not determinists.

*********

“These types of questions taken together it seems to me are an example of
where in our day-to-day work as volunteer managers, we straddle the
essential problem of free will. Namely, that we sense implcitly a key
value of what we do is involve people where there aren’t causally
sufficient conditions to explain why volunteers do what they do. Yet,
we’re obliged explicitly to explain the value of volunteering in terms
that suggest there are causally sufficient conditions present.  

“Put
another way, we lean towards indeterminacy when we seek to explain the
value of volunteering as an activity in itself, yet we lean towards
determinacy when it comes to explaining the value of the products or
outcomes of volunteering. Perhaps compatabilism offers us a bridge, I’m
not sure.”

I really don’t know what you’re trying to get at. What do you mean there aren’t causally sufficient conditions for people to volunteer? If there aren’t, and I don’t know how you could know that, what you’re saying is that people don’t choose to volunteer, something else forces them to. But I don’t think you believe that. Maybe here you’re confusing ignorance of cause with lack og cause.

What do you mean by people lean towards indeterminacy when seeking to explain the value of volunteering in itself? That people are free to choose to volunteer? That seems pretty straightforward to me. But what does it have to do with ‘the value of volunteering in itself’? Just because someone chooses to do something freely doesn’t make it a good thing – it’s the outcomes that make an action beneficial or not. There is no ‘magic’ in the act of volunteering.

What do you mean people lean toward determinacy when explaining the value of outcomes? That people want to demonstrate that the volunteering led to the outcome? Again, this is unproblematic.

And what is the link between any of this and the philosophical concept of free will?

You need to firm up and clarify what it is you’re saying; at the moment it’s all very vague and rambling, taking up the philsophical debate at one moment, then listing towards sociology and politics at another. I think you may have something interesting to say, but at the moment it’s just not clear what.

Maybe all you want to say is that we believe people freely choose to volunteer, but we can’t always determine what motivates them to do so, although we can keep trying to. And, in addition, we believe volunteering leads to concrete social outcomes, which we can demonstrate through monitoring, research etc.

But you keep mentioning paradoxes and contradictions, and I can’t see where there are any. There is no paradox or contradiction between saying that people choose to volunteer freely – qualifying this, as a good campatibilist, with ‘to a greater or lesser extent’ – and that the volunteering leads to particular outcomes. Why do you think there is?

Are you simply confused by the idea that we can say both that people are free to choose to act and that actions cause outcomes? If so, you’re mixing up, as I suggested before, free will and cause and effect. Even in a deteministic world, it would be possible to say that an unfree action caused something to happen, it’s just that there would be a prior cause that led to all of it. For example, in a determined world you could still say that my opening my hand caused the cup to fall and break, even if I didn’t choose to open my hand.

Thanks for the comments. Really appreciate it.

I guess if there was one point I wanted to make in the post it was that when thinking about the idea of volunteering, we’d do well as a community to seek inspiration beyond the field of volunteering research per se. In other words, it’s about exploring rather than straying. Any explorer can surely benefit from maps and helpful advice

Happy to respond to your points here – but hope to go into them in much more depth in the weeks ahead as I begin a series of posts about some of the subjects and issues you mention. 

Before diving into the free will debate – let’s back up a second. It’s widely agreed that we should base our conception of volunteering on the assumption that the volunteer (the agent) has a degree of freedom. Disagreements often centre on the extent to which the agent is really free. Take for example all the discussions we have about mandated service. My point is that setting this thinking within the context of the problem of free will can potentially help enlighten these discussions.

My brief post inevitably oversimplifies philosophical questions that have been the subject of pages and pages of academic discourse at the highest level for so long. However, bear with me – I reckon that there’s much in the free will debate that resonates profoundly with the kinds of issues we discuss frequently in the field of volunteering.

Hard or physical determinism of the sort referred to in the quote from Einstein in my post, where life was fixed from the big bang is one account of determinism. But I suspect this view of determinism (though fascinating) doesn’t have much to say about the kinds of issues we’re interested in with volunteering.

Plenty of determinists would argue that choice, the sense that we’re free to take decisions in line with our own will, is an illusion. But not all. Within determinism, many compatabilists would argue that we’re still able to take morally meaningful choices. Here’s one part of the free will debate we certainly should pay more attention to in volunteering debates.

One way compatabilists make sense of these possible choices is to internalise them. These issues of origination and control are where I think we come across plenty of fascinating issues that hold out big implications for how we understand volunteering. For isntance, Daniel Dennett talks about an explosion of evitability, pointing out that the laws of physics haven’t changed, yet the amount of morally meaningful choices open to us are massively greater than they were say 500 years ago. These are all questions that take us in the direction of psychology, neurology and human consciousness. Could a growth in evitability help explain the social significance in volunteering?

I referred to the seemingly contradictory beliefs of many modern Calvinist communities- precisely because it underlines this issue of what we mean by morally meaningful choices. It’s clear Calvinists didn’t and don’t want predestination to diminish human moral responsibility. These arguments, although from a different perspective (of theology), take us into the same interesting territory that compatabilism does with regards to how we understand volunteering. That is, if our actions reflect our will (our motivations, character, etc) they can be consistent with our sense of freedom and a determined world (whether by God or by the laws of physics). So if we’re trying to understand volunteering we can focus our efforts on working out what this freedom is, rather than whether life is determined (in this sense it’s irrelevant to whether we volunteer).

Yep, the kind of libertarians I’m referring to are those who’re libertarian in a metaphysical sense. I want to make the point that it’s libertarians that build on a common sense conception of free will – that on the face of it – many of us might believe is consistent with the way we approach volunteering. That’s to say, that whether we volunteer or not isn’t determined in advance and that we act as free agents when we decide to volunteer. Yet it’s equally true to say that many would disagree with many libertarian contentions overall. Actually, I have no idea how many of those active in volunteering would actually agree (which is partly why it’d be great to discuss this more with colleagues ).

So finally just wanted to touch on the paradoxical questions we ask ourselves. Obviously, there’s no conflict if you break these down and separate them out- it’s when you put them together that the contradiction arises. My point is that we’re increasingly being asked to make sense of them in the round. 

First type of questions are like: how many volunteers a programme manager may engage, how they’re engaged and what they do, etc. 

Second type of questions are like: what the outcomes are for beneficiaries were, were the actions of engaged volunteers causally sufficient to have brought about these outcomes, etc. 

These types of questions taken together it seems to me are an example of where in our day-to-day work as volunteer managers, we straddle the essential problem of free will. Namely, that we sense implcitly a key value of what we do is involve people where there aren’t causally sufficient conditions to explain why volunteers do what they do. Yet, we’re obliged explicitly to explain the value of volunteering in terms that suggest there are causally sufficient conditions present.  

Put another way, we lean towards indeterminacy when we seek to explain the value of volunteering as an activity in itself, yet we lean towards determinacy when it comes to explaining the value of the products or outcomes of volunteering. Perhaps compatabilism offers us a bridge, I’m not sure.

Anyway, this is one area I’m hoping to explore further in the next weeks. Would appreciate your help and thoughts in making sense of this in relation to current thinking about volunteering. Cheers again.
 

For example, if the determinists are right, then nobody ‘chooses’ to volunteer. That is, anyone who volunteers is predestined to do so. In a determinsitic world, nobody chooses anything, there is only the illusion of choice, the illusion of motivation. A person no more chooses to volunteer than a lump of rock chooses to orbit a star – that’s just the way it is.

Incompatibilists who believe in free will and deny determinism are METAPHYSICAL libertarians. This is an important distinction to make here because many of the people who promote volunteering are definitely NOT libertarians.

“A possible determinist explanation of why people volunteer would be that it’s largely due to how it makes us feel (that we are making a difference), not because we can actually intervene and bring about real change.”

No it’s not; the determinist explanation of why people volunteer is because past and present events necessitate it, ie again, you don’t choose to volunteer at all.

“Members of religious groups that believe in predestination, have the psychological incentive to act graciously as it provides a kind of tangible evidence that the individual is predestined to go to heaven.”

This is a contradiction. You are saying that the act is both the result of the belief and the proof of the truth of the belief. Rather, you might say acting graciously expresses the belief, but it isn’t evidence for its truth.

In any case, if you are predestined to go to heaven, you have no motive to act graciously, because you’re going anyway. It’s only because they believe they might otherwise go somewhere unpleasant that members of certain religions do so.

“In lieu of proof that we live in a free and undetermined world, acting as if it is, is the best way of ensuring it comes about.”

‘Fraid not. If the universe is determined, then nothing you do will have any effect – what will be, will be. Perhaps what you mean to say is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, you should assume that you have free will and act accordingly (which is what most people do).

“The compatibilist card we play as volunteers, is to say that whether the world is or isn’t determined is irrelevant to why we volunteer.”

Again, no; the point of being a compatibilist is that you believe that the truth of the matter is that life is both determined in some respects and not in others, not that the truth of the matter is irrelevant. That is, you assert something. I think what you want to say is that whether or not the world is determined has no effect on the fact that you feel like you make a free choice to volunteer.

“In the case of volunteering, we often come up against this issue in its most acute form when it comes to accounting for ourselves in front of our funders and supporters. How can we be sure that our actions can be traced to actual outcomes? How has the volunteering we built based on nothing but the free will of certain individuals determined a range of solid outcomes that can be precisely measured?”

These questions have nothing to do with free will in the philosophical sense that you have been discussing. They are about consequences of actions (which may or may not have been determined), not whether or not actions that lead to consequences are determined or free.

That is, you use ‘free will’ in a different sense here, ie in the usual everyday sense of the term. If you deconstruct ‘I volunteer of my own free will’ in the everyday sense, it actually means ‘I believe that I have free will and I have exercised that free will in choosing to volunteer’. This is why funders want proof that it was your actions that led to the outcomes, because we structure our society on the basis of the belief that we are all free to act as we will (to a greater or lesser extent).

Further, just using ‘free will’ and ‘determined outcomes’ in the same sentence doesn’t mean you have identified a paradox. Indeed, there is no paradox here. You are asking the very simple question, ‘how can I know that the actions of me and my volunteers caused the outcomes?’.

You have muddied the waters by straying into consideration of cause and effect, which, whilst related to the debate about free will in certain ways, is not the same thing. Causation is relevant to defending or applying for funding. Whether or not we are ultimately free is not.

The hospice movement is a really interesting case-in-point when looking at how public health services in and out of the NHS complement each other and work together. Certainly may be offer us plenty of lessons if this model is applied across other public services.

In terms of volunteers threatening anyone's job- I think this is exactly the point made from the 'adding value' perspective. If volunteers are supported by paid staff and get the recognition and respect they deserve, volunteering can add enormous value to public services. However, the question remains about what happens when publicly funded services are replaced by volunteer-driven services (as a matter of policy) whether this effectively adds up to job substitution (that ultimately devalues services and isn't sustainable in the long term).

Why is it that the hospice movement can see it as its job to raise funds to employ staff, but it seems to be absolute anathema for public services?

I really don't think volunteers are a threat to anyone's job in a sensibly-run and motivated organisation. Properly managed the volunteers would be thankful that the paid staff could be there when they couldn't and the staff would be glad of volunteers to take some of the load and raise funds to employ more staff or pay for more equipment.

I guess your point about evidence of impact was one of the reasons I found Paul's comment interesting. When I saw the title of the piece I thought it would be about Paul talking about their experiences with micro-volunteering, but when I listened to it he was just talking about it in a hypothetical context.

I think micro-volunteering as a context holds out a lot of potential for helping us rethink with volunteering. But like you, I think that the experience that there is is not that widespread in the UK volunteering community. However, I also think we should be looking for opportunities to try out and experiment with some of the possibilities on offer here from micro-volunteering: such as fomenting 'macro' volunteering and for scaling participation across communities and networks more effectively. Although there are still not that many examples of people using mobile technology in this way, we do have plenty of examples of how people have used the web in this way. The idea of small calls to action that scale as more people get involved, is a principle has all kinds of achievements to its name from Wikipedia through to Mozilla Firefox, from the Grameen Bank through to the development of mountain bikes. If however the question is how has mobile technology enabled this stuff- there are of course plenty of questions. But there are also interesting examples we can learn from such as http://www.ushahidi.com and http://www.frontlinesms.com

We're in interesting times – there is still loads to discover – loads to think through and create – and may be then in a few years from now we'll have much more substantial evidence of impact.