Surprised by the upvotes. This is a textbook example of ignoring the second-order effects and congratulating yourself for being smarter that the others.
Basically, game theory. Having an option taken away (by the past-you) is the winning strategy in the game of Chicken. Making paying for blackmail illegal reduces the incentive of other people to blackmail you. Yes, in certain situations having fewer options is better for you!
If you disagree with a specific case, you need to argue about that specific case. But there is no general rule about why having more options is always obviously better.
EDIT:
(Reformatted the text, maybe the previous version was confusing.)
The game theory example ignores the principal-agent effect. We are not talking about you rationally choosing to give up some of your options. We are talking about someone else, who is not well-aligned with you, taking away your options, generally without input from you.
It's not really sufficient to point out that second-order effects exist, one also needs to compare their size to the first-order effects.
As a steelman of taking away bad options:
By taking away bad options, one creates pressure for the creation of better options. In the short-term this is presumably bad, but in the longer term this may lead to the actual creation of better options, which may be good.
Disclaimer: I don't know to what extent I buy this steelman. But also I'm concerned about your post from a Chesterton's fence perspective. How did people develop the aversion to exploitation? Are we sure there isn't a good reason?
Basically, because the world where kidney selling is legal is not the world where mothers won't see their kids dying, it's the world where people are forced to sell their kidneys to pay their student loans.
Useful heuristic for deontology-violation: this shit usually doesn't have good consequences in the end.
This is absolutely false. Here in Iran selling kidneys is legal. Only desperate people do sell. No one sells their kidneys for something trivial like education.
To me, your post looks like you lay out your own position without really engaging with why people hold the opposite position and strawman people by saying that they lack immagination.
Quite recently jeffk wrote Consent Isn't Always Enough.
To steelman the anti-sex-for-rent case, it could be considered that after the tenant has entered into that arrangement, the tenant could feel pressure to keep having sex with the landlord (even if they would prefer not to and would not at that later point choose to enter the contract) due to the transfer cost of moving to a new home. (Though this also applies to monetary rent, the potential for threatening the boundaries of consent is generally seen as more harmful than threatening the boundaries of one’s budget)
This could also be used as a point of leverage by the landlord to e.g. pressure the tenant to engage in sex acts they would otherwise not want to or else be evicted (unless the contract specifies from the beginning exactly what kind of sex the payment will entail). I think many people would see such actions by the landlord as more of an infringement upon the tenant than e.g. raising the amount of monetary rent (sacredness of sex/consent).
Additionally, this could be seen as a specific manifestation of the modern trend of more general opposition to sexual relationships with a power imbalance between the participants.
(Parenthetically, I also want to thank you for writing this post, as it’s a good expression of a principle I generally agree with)
Having an extra option is good for one person, if all else stays constant. But giving an extra option to several competing people can lead to an arms race where everyone ends up worse off. (Imagine allowing steroids in the Olympics.) And conversely, taking away an option can prevent an arms race. This can happen for both "good" and "bad" options.
Allowing people to sell their kidneys
That means that, in the case of blackmail / threats / extortion / addiction / anything else that systematically acts as a resource sink that swallows resources until the victim has nothing left, the victim's kidneys are now part of "everything they have".
It might still be worthwhile to have a market for kidneys, even taking that into account. But it's not a one-sided tradeoff.
When I try to make similar arguments, a common response is "Oh so you think people being forced to sell their kidneys is fine!". You touch on this a little but I think an important thing to reiterate is that creating a world where people have good options is good, but banning a bad option isn't the way to do it.
If you don't want people to have to sell kidneys to pay for X, look for solutions that make X cheaper or that make people richer, and then see if your solution worked by monitoring if people are still needing to sell their kidneys to buy X.
Regarding the rent for sex thing: The statistics I've been able to find are all over the place, but it looks like men are much more likely to not have a proper place to sleep than women. My impression is this is caused by lots of things (I think there are more ways for a woman to be eligible for government/non-profit assistance, for example), but it does seems like evidence that women are exchanging sex for shelter anyway (either directly/explicitly or less directly, like staying in a relationship where the main thing she gets is shelter and the main thing the other person gets is sex).
I wrote a post on respecting Chesterton-Schelling fences that seems relevant. Specifically, by removing the guardrail of "paying rent with sex is illegal" or "selling kidneys is illegal" without a careful analysis of why the guardrail is there in the first place, and what kind of a slippery slope lies beyond the fence is likely to cause unintended harm. For example, people might get pressured to sell organs, or to supplement rent with sexual favors, because it become legal. This is not just "removing a bad option", it is entrenching a different bad option. There are definitely ways to improve the situation, such as working on minimum wage laws, subsidized rent, free and stigma-free food and medication, and maybe even UBI. But there is no clear, simple and obviously good solution in any of your examples, as I can see. There are some more obvious cases, like removing overcomplicated zoning and building restrictions in California, but even there one must be careful to consider the consequences.
I was prompting GPT-4 a bit to come up with examples of stories of exploitation and how they work, and some of the ideas it came up with made me think:
What typically happens to the resources gained in typical cases of exploitation?
Like you give two examples in your post. But I don't want to address the India example, partly because there's a hypothetical element to it (e.g. tuberculosis treatment is free in India), and partly because it may be unusual. (If the examples you give are unusual, perhaps the issue is not the concept of/aversion to exploitation, but rather that we are missing some other rule that makes an exception for the case you mention.)
What about more typical examples? Like the archetypal example of exploitation is sweatshop labor. But what happens to the money that the laborers earn? Are property rights strong enough that they get to keep it? The sweatshop presumably earns a profit, which presumably gives it some sort of power; what does it use this power for? If the sweatshop causes some sort of problem, who pays? What kind of work would the workers have if the sweatshops weren't available, and how do the long-term consequences of that work differ from the long-ter...
You can only sell your kidney once, but you have to make rent every month. Selling off assets to pay the rent is a losing game. When you've spent all the money, you're back where you were, but living on one kidney.
More generally, the more money available to the poor, the more rent-seekers will take it away from them. That doesn't mean that the poor will necessarily be left in the same place, but it is an ancient observation that "ye have the poor always with you". That remains true today, everywhere in the world, despite the enormously greater wealth around.
The problem is that the happy-tenants outcome is a fabricated option. 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.
Actual real-life people don't behave like homo economicus with respect to sex. There's no reason to expect that if the landlord can't rent the apartment for sex, he would rent it for a monetary amount that is equivalent to what he would be willing to pay for sex.
(He also probably wants sex with a particular perso...
You're ignoring the impact of incentives. Having an additional option could improve people's situation at the moment you add it, but create incentives that make people worse off in the long run.
Except Iran. Why is a theocracy the only country capable of being rational about this?
I've heard that the 1980s economic sanctions were so severe that Iran didn't have dialysis machines, so they desperately needed other treatment options for kidney disease.
I disagreed with the post for the reasons given by tailcalled, but in the end, decided to upvote it. I did so because I think its line of reasoning is valid and the counterpoint is often not made precise enough, i.e., tailcalled's counterargument is weak as given, even if morally appealing.
"exploitation" is defined for those decisions because life rights (Including one's actual life like suicide, significant and irreversible physical damage like selling kidneys, and special body right like sex trading), as the most special right among given rights, are most prone to force. Exploitation includes being driven by the environment such as bad financial conditions. Under these conditions, governments or other equity organizations should be ready to help rather than letting one suffer, from the lawmaker's perspective.
Yes, we are living in an imperf...
Legalizing X doesn't just mean you can do X if you want to. Legalizing X helps normalize X, and gives other people license to expect you to do X. When child labor was legal, society could expect the poor to rent their children to mines and factories. Were the poor forced to rent their children at gunpoint? Well, no. They were coerced by economic circumstance, as usual.
If you legalize a way to mitigate desperate poverty, then the desperately poor can be expected to do that. And those who refuse will be seen as unsympathetic and unworthy of assistance. After all, how can you say you're really poor? You have an idle ten-year-old and a perfectly good spare kidney!
How about slavery? Should that be legal? Stealing food, medication? Age limits?
There are all sorts of things that are illegal which, in rare cases, would be better off being legal. But the legal system is a somewhat crude tool. Proponents of these laws would argue that in most cases, these options do more harm than good. Whether that's true or not is an open question from what I can tell. Obviously if the scenarios you provide are representative then the answer is clear. But I'm not sure why we should assume that to be the case. Addiction and mental illnes...
Also, selling a kidney by no means needs to be a bad option, by the lights of the seller. The most serious proposals for a legal kidney market compensate the seller to the tune of many tens of thousands of dollars, provide lifelong checkups and health care, screening processes to give them an out if they’re being pressured into selling, and more.
One thing I keep wondering about the sex-for-rent case: does banning it decrease the amount of horny landlords (because now owning land is no longer incentivized for horny people), increase the amount of horny landlords (because now horny landlords can no longer 'waste' their wealth on sex and instead acummulate wealth), or does the rate stay the same (because the transactions go through anyway, just outside the housing market)?
Taking a bad option away might be worse for a person, but will be much better for the people. These regulations (no selling organs or sex) exists, becuse in a free market there would be a race-to-bottom which would not increase human values.
Suppose we allow selling sex for rent. The number of rentable apartmants stays the same; however, there will more demand for them, because some people can now pay for them by non-monetary means. Because of this, the rent prices will increase, and that would just accelerate the rent-problem.
While exchanging kidneys for m...
I believe this is not just out of ignorance. This usually further helps the elites while hurting both middle and lower classes. The lower classes will have their options taken, while the middle class will lose out on a lot of beneficial trades. The elites have access to alternative, possibly illegal, deals so they benefit instead. Elites might even control these alternative channels themselves, and so directly benefit from the government induced monopoly.
Another example is vaccine challenge trials. Obviously Covid isn’t as bad for someone like Trump who gets access to expensive experimental treatments, while it devastated the middle and lower classes.
I believe this is not just out of ignorance. This usually further helps the elites while hurting both middle and lower classes. The lower classes will have their options taken, while the middle class will lose out on a lot of beneficial trades. The elites have access to alternative, possibly illegal, deals so they benefit instead. Elites might even control these alternative channels themselves, and so directly benefit from the government induced monopoly.
Another example is vaccine challenge trials. Obviously Covid isn’t as bad for someone like Trump who gets access to expensive experimental treatments, while it devastated the middle and lower classes.
Nitpicking the landlord case: Banning sex for rent drives down prices.
Suppose the market rate for a room is £500 or X units of sex. Most people pay in money but some are desperate and lack £500 so they pay in sex. One day the government bans paying in sex. This is an artificial constraint on demand, some people who would have paid at the old sex rate are being prevented from doing so. When you constrain demand on something with relatively inelastic supply, prices fall. Specifically, the rooms that would have been rented for sex sit empty until their ...
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, typical-minding, 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[1] and will die unless she can get money for antibiotics. Mrs Singh has three options:
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[2]. Because almost every government[3] 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. 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 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. 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:
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[4]. 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 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[5] 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
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.
If India has already rolled out free tuberculosis treatment, substitute some other disease.
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'.
Except Iran. Why is a theocracy the only country capable of being rational about this?
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.
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.