Should we abolish evil?

Color me intrigued.

Have you any book recommendations?

I think the distinction is important.

Jason Voorhees, for example, presumably has massive brain damage. He may be medically incapable of having a guilt/hesitation reflex, and he may be unable to comprehend that killing people is wrong or bad. If that is indeed a curable medical condition, it should be cured, depending on cost and practicality.

Movie!Magneto, on the other hand, is presumably medically sane. He intends nothing but good for society, usually. He is shown to have a guilt/hesitation reflex, and definitely understands the extent to which his actions are socially unacceptable. His choices are made out of logic (he has resources unavailable to most people), and his will to do what he feels needs to be done. He is incurable in a medical sense. To change his actions, you would either have to inflict a medical condition or change his circumstances (or at least his perspective).

Note that I'm not saying his decision to murder every baseline human on the planet was correct, simply that it wasn't the result of a curable medical condition.

Haven't seen First Class, by the way.

Start with the DSM. It's instructive to read earlier versions of the DSM so that you can see how the terminology was developed. But stick to the current definitions to avoid confusion.

My specialty is in sexual perversions; I can give you a list of books dealing with that in private messages if you wish. You're more interested in psychopathy and sociopathy, and all I can tell you is that "Without Conscience" is supposed to be very good (I've read excerpts) and there's a new book called "The Psycopath Test" that I haven't gotten yet. Aside from that I've done general research about the nature of mental deviancy and some studies of specific serial killers.

dsm?

Sorry, it was mentioned earlier in the thread. The "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" is the bible for psychologists. Currently in its fourth edition, although a fifth is due out next year.

The DSM describes symptoms of every known mental problem in human beings, or at least as many as they could manage to fit into the book. It also puts them into rough classifications and offers treatment guidelines. Note that its terminology may be confusing to the layman; Sociopathy is a subset of 'Antisocial personality disorder', and I forget whether they've relabeled psychopathy or not.