[NhanH]

> But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way, maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event. If your neighbor is thinking about how to make a bomb, or how to kill someone, or how to commit suicide, or how to defraud and deceive others, wouldn't it be better if the secret police put a stop to it there? > We could live in a post-crime society. Where everyone is un-corruptable and all humans treat each other as lovingly as we treat our own bodies. The problem with this is that the secret police only enforce the rules of the rulers, which has a thicker script for the lower classes than the upper classes.

In the past, philosophers have been discussing about "The problem of evil"[0] - which is the paradox of an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God allowing (morally) evil to exist. Obviously, it's normally discussed in a theological context, but one argument would apply to a non-theological context as well: the defense of free will. Since free will is the more important/ preferable than non-existent of evil, you can't have human with free will but without the choice of being evil. So as long as free will exists, you will have to be content with having evil/ crime etc as well.

Just to be clear, "evil" in the previous paragraph is being used in the sense of morally bad, and not the invisible, flying, human-haunting type.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

[maaku]

It is not clear that notion of free will is even a consistent concept however. E.g. free will is perfectly explained as what a deterministic decision process feels like from the inside.