Good Done Right

Good Done Right was a conference on effective altruism held at All Souls College, Oxford on 7-9 July, 2014. It was perhaps the very first conference of its kind, and it featured an impressive roster of speakers. Some of the talks explored topics, such as moral trade, that would later become more widely discussed. One of these presentations was so good that I decided to transcribe it.

Recordings of all the talks were subsequently made available on a website dedicated to the conference. Unfortunately, the website has since gone offline, and the Internet Archive hasn’t indexed it properly. I contacted Andreas Mogensen, the conference organizer, and he supplied me with an image of the original conference poster (displayed below), but noted that he was no longer in possession of any of the audio recordings. Andreas also clarified that the list of speakers in the poster doesn’t quite match the list of people that actually spoke at the event: Thomas Pogge didn’t speak, whereas Elizabeth Ashford and Michelle Hutchinson did.

After a bit of detective work, I managed to locate recordings of most of these presentations. At the time of writing, three of these are on a Soundcloud channel devoted to the conference, and most of the others are preserved by EA Talks. All these talks are listed below, in alphabetical order. I also obtained a number of photos of the event taken by Toby Ord, who kindly gave permission to share them here. I haven’t been able to find recordings of the talks by Larissa MacFarquhar and Derek Parfit (as the 80,000 Hours announcement confirms, both MacFarquhar and Parfit did participate in the event). However, upon noticing this post, Matthew van der Merwe reached out to me and generously shared the pdf Parfit used as the basis for his presentation (which he obtained from Parfit himself). I include a link to this text file as a substitute for the missing audio file. If anyone else not listed in the conference programme spoke at the conference, besides Ashford and Hutchinson, I haven’t been able to find traces of their presentations.

• Elizabeth Ashford, The allowing of severe poverty as the discarding of persons’ lives
• Nick Beckstead, How can a long-run perspective help with strategic cause selection?
• Nick Bostrom, Crucial considerations and wise philanthropy
• Owen Cotton-Barratt, Prioritising under uncertainty
• Norman Daniels, Cost-effectiveness analysis and prioritization
• Rachel Glennerster, Using cost-effectiveness vs cost-benefit analysis in decision-making
• Michelle Hutchinson, “Too Young to Die?” – How valuable is it to extend lives of different ages?
• Jeremy Lauer, Priority setting in the health sector using cost-effectiveness – The WHO-CHOICE approach
• Will MacAskill, Effective altruism: the very idea
• Toby Ord, Moral trade
• Derek Parfit, How we can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion