I don't understand. Why do you have to wonder? No offense but there is a lot of hand waving going on in your post, like this:

> Uber, being big and diversified could easily take on that risk and insure against it (or really just self insure with their scale)

Uber is a marketing channel. Why would they want to take on this risk? Why is it "right" for them to take on this risk? Exactly how easy for them would it be? How much would it cut into their profits?

> It's certainly worth thinking about more deeply than simply shrugging and saying that you can't take advantage of someone in a voluntary transaction.

I don't agree with this. It's a free choice, as free as you can get. Yes, some people have better choices than others in life. But just because I can't spend my life making exactly the choices I want doesn't mean someone is taking advantage of me.

Why do some people have better choices than others in life? In particular for people that only have bad choices do we, as a society, bare some of the responsibility for that? Is it a sign that we've done something wrong?

To be clear, I don't have all the answers to these questions, but they are the questions that I ask myself when issues like this come up.

You're making it this big societal argument. I agree that what you are talking about makes sense. It's why we don't allow child labor, for instance.

I'm questioning whether Uber is one of those situations. I don't think you're making it clear that it is, so much as that those situations exist. Which I don't contest.

To what degree do Uber's business practices create (or at least perpetuate) those situations? To what degree are they part of a giant societal machine that creates or perpetuates those situations?

> some people are getting really really rich off the labor of some really poor people

The answer to this is more competition between companies. Uber is enjoying temporary market dominance.