Don't take bad options away from people

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.)

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.

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 [LW · GW].

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.

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)

Allowing people to sell their kidneys

1. Allows people with two kidneys and little money to convert that to one kidney and lots of money
2. Creates a market for kidneys, thus making the monetary value of having two kidneys legible

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 [LW · GW] 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-term consequences of sweatshops?

I guess I can consider the sex for rent example. It seems to me that the (sex <-> home) exchange can already go through with standard prostitution where the prostitute sells sex to other men than her landlord. So it doesn't seem like you would be doing much to better satisfy anyone's preferences, except maybe by eliminating transaction costs? On the other hand, while it wouldn't open up many new trades, it seems like having a prostitute directly sell to her landlord would change the power relations, since it would make her more dependent on this specific landlord's goodwill.

(Actually, what happens if e.g. the prostitute can no longer provide sex for the landlord? E.g. if the landlord changes the kind of sex he wants to be something that the prostitute doesn't provide? Or if the prostitute stops working for the landlord as a prostitute? Or if the landlord gets married and his wife doesn't accept him having a prostitute? Or various other changes? Probably for some of these, the landlord may be somewhat screwed. But legally, would there be any where the prostitute could get evicted? Would she be entitled to some sort of benefits from the government as a result of that?)

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 person, not with a random person, which already means that he wouldn't raise the price of the apartment to enough to pay for a prostitute.)

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.

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 imperfect world, thus people will fall into desperate situations, but laws exist to prevent the world from further degrading.

From another perspective, if life can be legally made to profit, there will be incentives for others to force those who can't resist doing so, essentially turning mankind into goods. If this is still not bad, then I assume massacres are also bearable?

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 illness immediately come to mind when I think of the most probable reasons for people to decide to take these options.

I don't want to live in a world where women have to prostitute themselves to afford rent. Have them be homeless until the homelessness situation becomes severe enough that we resolve it. Otherwise, IMO, we are just boiling the frog. There will be no protests, no riots, because selling our kidneys and having sex for rent is just enough for us to get by. 

Maybe these options should be legal in developing countries. But in the developed world we can truly afford to avoid these scenarios for all mentally healthy and non-addicted individuals. So, let's do that, rather than lowering our standards. If some portion of the population must suffer before we realize what we're doing wrong, then that's a price that needs to be paid.

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.

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.

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 medical treatment is OK for me, it should not be mixed with the standard money market. The forces of money markets usually optimize for dollar value, which could be decoupled from human wellbeing. The result would be a worse state for everyone.

Also: If the rent is so high, why can't a developer build a new complex? They could rent it out and would very fastly pay for itself. It would increase the number of flats and lower rents. These bad options try to solve a supply issue from demand side.

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 prices are lowered, the new market rate is £490.

Some people are still worse off because of this (a lot of the desperate people don't have £490 to pay either) but there are possible values where the utilitarian calculus works out net positive (plenty of non-desperate people still benefit from lower rent). One can imagine the government in a productive role as a renter's negotiating partner: "Gosh Mr. Landlord, I'd love to pay in sex but that's illegal, best I can do is £490."

More examples:

• Prostitution
• Suicide