# Don't take bad options away from people

Short version: when people are in a bad situation and only have bad options, *taking one of those options away is wrong and causes suffering.* Not understanding this is a common failure mode among the general population and results in a lot of situations where governments are actively harming poor and desperate people.

Why does this happen? I think it's a combination of [fabricated options](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gNodQGNoPDjztasbh/lies-damn-lies-and-fabricated-options), [typical-minding](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy), and the usual political failure mode where activists care more about signalling their virtue than actually putting in the effort to understand what does and does not help people. It's also often easy to strawman the case for not taking people's options away. 

**Example 1: selling kidneys**

Mrs Singh is an impoverished Indian woman who loves her children. One child has contracted tuberculosis[^9my3o3g2cne] and will die unless she can get money for antibiotics. Mrs Singh has three options:

1.  sell a kidney to get the money
2.  do something else desperate and maybe illegal to get money
3.  watch the child die

I wish we lived in an ideal world where everyone had access to free health care and no one was desperate for money. But when you're truly desperate for money, at least you can sell a kidney. Oh wait, that's illegal[^uydcj2ww8x]. Because almost every government[^35e8b4p7uqd] decided to take the only halfway-good option away from desperate people. 

(In a comparable situation where no money was involved - say a British Mrs Smith needed to donate one of her own kidneys to save a child with kidney failure, and the surgery was free on the National Health Service - no-one thinks that the desperate mother is exploited and should be saved from donating a kidney for her own good. I defy anyone who is anti-selling-kidneys to explain why Mrs Smith is not exploited but Mrs Singh is.)

How can the world get this so wrong? My best guess is typical-mind fallacy. Activists and lawmakers tend to be reasonably well-off people who are unlikely to be so desperate that selling a kidney is their best option. So they are unable to put themselves in the mindset of someone genuinely desperate and assume that anyone who sells a kidney must be exploited in some way. And they make the lives of desperate people even harder while telling themselves how virtuous they are. 

**Example 2: sex for rent**

The UK, where I live, bans people from having sex with their landlord as a form of rent, and recently had a debate on toughening the law [even further](https://www.landlordzone.co.uk/news/sex-for-rent-landlords-to-face-seven-years-in-jail-says-new-bill-amendment/). Note that the debate specifically references landlords with empty rooms who advertise for people who are willing to have sex in lieu of rent. This is not about landlords trying to change the terms of agreement with existing money-paying tenants, a situation where there really would be a risk of coercion.

Insofar as I can [pass the ITT](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ideological-turing-tests) of the proponents, I think it goes something like this: "Evil exploitative landlords demand sex from tenants. If we just stop them then the happy tenants could live exploitation-free."

The problem is that the happy-tenants outcome is a [fabricated option](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gNodQGNoPDjztasbh/lies-damn-lies-and-fabricated-options). What would actually happen is that the landlords who can't rent to tenants willing to have sex would just rent the room to someone who can pay a market rate in money instead. (And probably then use the cash to pay prostitutes - which is actually legal in the UK - since we've already established that these landlords are willing to give up cash to get sex.)

From the point of view of the prospective tenants, the legal-sex-for-rent situation gives them three options:

1.  Pay a shockingly high rent for a room somewhere, which they may or may not be able to afford at all
2.  Agree to have sex with their landlord and pay nothing or a very discounted rent which they can afford
3.  Be homeless

These are all bad options, and anyone who has to choose between them is already in a bad situation. I wish we lived in an ideal world where everyone would have good options[^okaarf9p4ls]. But *in the world we actually live in,* it's not hard to understand that some people would genuinely choose option 2 as the least-bad choice. So when you ban sex-for-rent you are taking people's best option away from them and forcing them to fall back on alternatives which they have already decided are worse, probably including homelessness. The ban makes people's lives worse and it specifically impacts people whose lives are already tough. 

As well as the fabricated option, I think the pro-ban case suffers from the same sort of typical-minding as my selling kidneys example. Activists and lawmakers can't themselves imagine ever agreeing to sex-for-rent, because they can't put themselves in the mindset of someone who is really at risk of homelessness, so they assume anyone who does agree must be subject to some kind of coercion. 

And, of course, the anti-ban position is easy to strawman. The pro-ban people will find some horrible situation where a landlord chained a tenant to the bed and used them as a sex slave or whatever and pretend that is the [central case](https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwicyK66lfX9AhWRbcAKHSvBBN4QFnoECAwQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lesswrong.com%2Fposts%2FyCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp%2Fthe-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world&usg=AOvVaw2AUVsboqp4f-tzI8MYh_pk) we are talking about. Instead of admitting that this is obviously illegal and would still be illegal even if consensual sex-for-rent was allowed. 

**A rant about 'exploitation'**

Often when governments take bad options away from people, they justify themselves by saying that they are protecting people from exploitation. Except that they effectively define exploitation as "doing something I would never be desperate enough to do". I think the entire category of argument where you claim to be protecting someone from *making the wrong choice* is false.

(The most important word in that sentence is 'choice'. I agree that where someone is being coerced or deceived into doing something against their will then they are being exploited and it's governments' job to protect them. But when someone would reflectively endorse X as their least bad option, then taking X away from them is wrong.)

Taking the least bad option away from consenting adults is also offensively infantilising. It's an expression of the attitude that "those poor people are too dumb to know what's good for them, so we'll make their decisions for them". It is an attitude that has repeatedly gone wrong in history[^n45ecs2wel] and will go wrong again. 

Please, dear readers, don't make this mistake, and push back against other people who are trying to make this mistake. We could reduce human suffering at zero cost just by not throwing obstacles into the way of poor and desperate people who are trying to do the best they can in difficult circumstances.

**More examples**

The following are exercises for the reader

*   Sweatshop jobs at low wages in developing countries
*   Building codes in developed countries that require all new dwellings to have a certain minimum floor area
*   Paying someone to be a surrogate mother (ie carry someone else's baby in her womb)
*   Can you generate an example of your own?

**ETA: Final thoughts after reading the comments**

I think my initial version overstated a couple of things. I should have been clearer about stating: don't take away bad options ***that the individual would reflectively endorse*****.** A couple of commenters said they were happy not to be at risk of accidentally doing something terrible because they were caught out by some small print. That is not what I'm trying to say. I have no problem with regulations to check that someone really is fully informed and consenting before they take a major decision. But if someone genuinely wants to sell their kidney, for example, we should respect their choice.

I should also have been clearer that I was specifically reacting against the idea that politicians and regulators should take people's options away *because they think they understand what is good for the poor and desperate better than they do themselves.* I think that's not only wrong, it's roughly equivalent to the Victorians who thought the women's rights movement should go away because male relatives would make better decisions for their women than the women would themselves. You can do someone an awful lot of harm while claiming it's for their own good. 

Having said that, a couple of commenters raised the example of arms race dynamics such as educational signalling, where rational individuals will fall into a bad Nash equilibrium, and it can be to everyone's benefit to prevent the arms race. I agree in principle with this case. (Notice that in the arms race example, the justification is *not* that the regulator knows what is good for people better than they do themselves, it's that the regulator is in a better position to fix a coordination failure.)

Finally, I would like to thank Brendan Long for this: creating a world where people have good options is good, but banning a bad option isn't the way to do it. That is an excellent one-line summary of what I am trying to argue. 

[^9my3o3g2cne]: If India has already rolled out free tuberculosis treatment, substitute some other disease.  

[^uydcj2ww8x]: Of course, making things illegal doesn't prevent them from happening. It just means that Mrs Singh no longer has the option 'sell the kidney in a proper hospital with a legal contract that will be enforced by the law' and now has the option 'sell the kidney in some unsanitary backstreet operation and pray like hell that the criminals she dealt with will give her the money they promised'.  

[^35e8b4p7uqd]: Except Iran. Why is a theocracy the only country capable of being rational about this? 

[^okaarf9p4ls]: Or more realistically, a world where developed countries built enough housing so that people could afford to pay the rent without being forced into desperate choices. 

[^n45ecs2wel]: Think of a typical Victorian man who sincerely believed that men should make decisions for women, because men knew better and women couldn't make decisions for themselves. Or a colonial administrator who thought that "civilised" people should make decisions for "ignorant savages" who didn't know what was good for them. History does not look kindly on these attitudes, nor should it.