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, 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: 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[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 the
