You're either ignoring "absent human action" or taking it to mean something wildly different from what I had in mind.

I took it to mean "absent further human action", which I thought was the only coherent way to interpret your post. (If that's not what you meant, then please forgive the rant.)

If what you really meant was "absent human action at all" (i.e. just nature), then in your original example about koi, the "natural" status quo would not have been no-koi-in-bathtub, but instead no-bathtub-at-all.

So the only way I could make sense of your example was to assume that you were assigning special status to "no further action" such that it was more relevant to the question of what to do with the bathtub than comparing the utilities of "being able to shower" and "having pet koi" in order to optimize for fairness.

I'm not saying that I think your position is that the status quo is always better. That would be a silly straw man. I'm just saying that privileging the status quo is a form of anchoring that can make people resist change even when they'd consider the new state of affairs to be "more fair" than the old state of affairs, had they not been anchored.

In my example about discovering the bathtub home to koi, "no further action" would have left the koi in place. The misleading advertising had already happened. It would take further action to find the koi a new home.

In my example about the slaveowner being confronted by abolitionists, "no further action" would have kept the slave enslaved. The slave had already been bought "fair and square" according to the rules at the time. The status quo was legal slavery. Abolition is what needed further action.

Am I completely missing your point? If so, by what interpretation of "status quo" was your original koi example relevant?