&gt; If by nuaced you mean introducing external factors to cloud the problem.<p>No, by &quot;nuanced&quot; I mean that in a system with such strong interaction between the components (anything can affect anything) there are always what you may consider &quot;external&quot; factors. People cloud the problem by artificially simplifying it when they don&#x27;t consider the whole picture (usually just to make their decision easier).<p>&gt; At the end of the day, if it&#x27;s &#x27;mutually beneficial&#x27;, how could it possibly be &#x27;exploitation&#x27;?<p>Wonderful question. Good thing that philosophers have debated it for many years, now. Read the link I provided for an intro to the discussion.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s other people&#x27;s job to make sure their map is good.<p>That is one possible ethical position, but if you explore how it was constructed, you would see it is far from trivial. To help you along, consider the axioms that have led you to the conclusion and how you came up with them.<p>But consider a simple example: suppose that you notice some oil-spill on the sidewalk that you manage avoid stepping into. Do you have zero responsibility to warn others? If so why? If not, why not?<p>&gt; i&#x27;m pretty sure they would rather have, in your contrived example, a dude with a tank of water selling them overpriced H2O than to die in a desert.<p>Sure, but that alone is not sufficient to absolve the dude from any moral obligation. Consider the case where the dude shoots your leg off and then offers to sell you a tourniquet. You would rather buy it than die, but that doesn&#x27;t make him ethically right. This is a completely different question from that of mutually-beneficial exploitation, but it just shows why offering you a better choice is not enough. It also hints to why many consider mutually beneficial exploitation to be wrong (or at least to impose added moral responsibility on the exploiter): sometimes to consider ethics, it&#x27;s not enough to consider two choices: sell you the tourniquet or not, but also other choices, such as not shooting you in the first place.<p>In my example of the man in the desert, the two choices are not just selling you water or not, but quite a few: helping ensure that the map is right (say, by writing a letter to the mapmaker), giving you the water for free, selling you the water for a low price, selling you the water for a fair price (for some definition of fair), selling you the water for a high price. Each of these many choices has their own ethical value (things don&#x27;t have to be binary). But understand this: the claim isn&#x27;t that because you can always choose an even more ethical choice then a less-ethical one is &quot;wrong&quot;, but that if you benefit by making a particular choice rather than a &quot;better&quot; one, that benefit may impose added moral responsibility on you.<p>But as I said, it&#x27;s a very complicated topic.