The Crime Fighting Paradox

Society confronts an uncomfortable reality: crimes such as rape and murder profoundly destroy human agency. Yet, paradoxically, eliminating such crimes completely would require mechanisms—such as absolute surveillance and total control—that also fundamentally destroy human agency. This paradox reveals a deeper, nuanced truth: the realistic moral imperative isn't absolute eradication of all harm but the maximization of total human agency.

The Fundamental Trade-off

Agency—the ability of individuals to make meaningful choices—is the cornerstone of human dignity, flourishing, and progress. Yet agency inherently implies the possibility of choices harmful to others. Absolute eradication of harm is impossible without destroying the very freedom that makes moral agency valuable.

Thus, society faces a critical balance:

• Allow too much freedom, and the resulting harms severely diminish individual agency through victimization.

• Allow too much intervention, and society itself becomes an oppressor, removing agency through coercive controls and invasive oversight.

Finding the optimal balance means maximizing the sum total of human agency.

The Illusion of Zero Tolerance

The ethical stance of zero tolerance for severe crimes such as rape and slavery is intuitively appealing. However, zero tolerance as a moral standard must be distinguished from zero tolerance as a practical reality. Zero tolerance as policy commits society to continually strive toward reduction and expresses moral outrage, but as an actual achievable goal, it is inevitably unattainable without catastrophic costs in personal freedoms.

Imagine, for example, a society that deploys ubiquitous surveillance, predictive policing, or neurological interventions to prevent any potential crime. Though crime rates might plummet, the price paid—in terms of autonomy, privacy, trust, and genuine choice—would be intolerable. In this scenario, society itself would become the most comprehensive destroyer of human agency, more profound than the harms it sought to prevent.

The Realistic Alternative: Maximizing Agency

A more philosophically coherent and practically achievable goal is explicitly maximizing agency. To do this, societies must:

• Vigorously combat the worst harms that destroy agency, using carefully calibrated law enforcement, justice systems, and social norms.

• Continuously evaluate the marginal gains and losses in agency when pursuing reductions in crime. The optimal balance point is reached when the marginal benefit in reduced harm precisely equals the marginal cost in lost freedom and privacy due to increased enforcement.

This approach explicitly acknowledges diminishing returns in enforcement: the cost of eliminating the last marginal acts of harm becomes extraordinarily high, while the marginal benefit approaches zero. Thus, a certain small level of residual harm—though morally troubling—becomes inevitable if we wish to preserve authentic freedom and meaningful choices.

Tools for Maximizing Agency

To achieve agency maximization, societies rely on:

• Culture and Norms: Encouraging voluntary, non-coercive constraints through moral education, community standards, and social incentives.

• Empowerment and Education: Building resilience, self-reliance, and decision-making capacity among individuals to both resist harm and flourish despite residual risks.

• Transparent Institutions: Ensuring institutions remain accountable, minimally intrusive, and respectful of individual autonomy, explicitly avoiding overly invasive enforcement.

• Technological Innovations: Utilizing tools like decentralized reputation systems, transparent auditing, and privacy-preserving technologies to reduce enforcement costs while maintaining accountability.

Conclusion: Continuous Improvement, Not Utopia

Recognizing agency maximization as the guiding principle reframes society's responsibility. Rather than endlessly chasing the mirage of total eradication—which ultimately leads to authoritarian extremes—society must embrace an ongoing, pragmatic pursuit of minimizing harm while maximizing genuine human freedom.

The practical, morally consistent, and philosophically rigorous goal is to explicitly seek continuous improvement, striking the most beneficial balance between agency-destroying harm and agency-preserving freedom. In this nuanced equilibrium lies the best possible world: not perfect, but continually better.