Humanitarian organisations base their policies on ethical principles rooted in the human rights convention and the capabilities framework. These policies often come into conflict with the values and desires of the very people they claim to be helping. This gives rise to an important ethical question: how should development practitioners act when their desires clash with the desires of local people? Many theorists and practitioners feel as if they have a strong ethical basis to intervene and challenge those local desires that violate basic human rights and capabilities. In this paper, I aim to show that this is not always a strong enough ethical basis for paternalistic intervention. I give normative and empirical arguments to show that in all but the most extreme cases, development practitioners should respect local desires, even when these desires appear to violate basic human rights and capabilities.