people will sometimes make decisions that are so bad that we have a moral obligation to intervene in order to protect them from the most disastrous outcomes

in archaic times, due to the primordial habit of turning people into slaves if they couldn’t repay their debts, people were legally forbidden from going into debt at all, except if they could prove that they were a reasonable person and it was economically likely that they could pay back the debt. that was in order to prevent them from the bad fates of slaves; which makes sense to me.