Freedom of will versus the prevention of atrocities

[kajarainbow]

If you had a method of making people nice, or at least making them not do the really terrible things that happen everyday (carnage and suffering around the world), is it morally acceptable to preemptively use it on everyone and sundry? Is it okay to use it only on proven offenders?

Does the inviolability of their psyches outweigh making the human race far better off?

Comments

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

Well, that's the standard theological argument for why God allows there to be evil in the world when he could easily dispense with it; the argument goes that he wants us to have freedom to choose.

Of course, why it's so important for us to have this choice that we must endure all the horrors of the world is usually not addressed, nor is why a good being would set us up to be potentially damned... that usually comes back to "God's will" or the unknowable, which really is no answer other than "Because."