 Moreover, there is a real danger that preventing mutually beneficial but exploitative transactions will wind up “consigning the vulnerable person to an even worse fate than being exploited” (Wood 1995: 156). After all, persons who are exploited are taken advantage of because of some antecedent vulnerability—a lack of access to clean drinking water, in the example above. Preventing exploitative transactions by itself does nothing to alleviate this vulnerability. Indeed, by depriving vulnerable parties of one possibility for improving their situation by engaging in a mutually beneficial transaction, such interference might actually exacerbate it.