I have been asked explicitly whether I would kill humans who are in terminal pain - and if not, where would I draw the line between humans and other animals?'

I do not 'draw the line'; I would regard it is as my moral duty to extend the practice of killing other animals in terminal pain to human animals too; I am not in the business of special pleading on behalf of my species although, other things being equal, I would defend a human life rather than a non-human one. So, I hope, would most people.

There are problems on both sides. Absolute exceptionless rules must, at least sometimes, lead to artificial absurdity; sceptical eclecticism (which leads to the acceptance that absolutes can lead one to act counter-intuitively) raises all sorts of ABSOLUTELY unanswerable questions such as 'how terminal is terminal' and 'how equal do other things have to be and how do you assess the extent of that equality' ? The answer lies, if anywhere, in the nature of the real world - the fact that risk-free decisions are elusive if not actually inaccessible.

I can only say that I am persuaded that there is such a thing as a life not worth living (in other words, that the notion of the ABSOLUTE sanctity of life is not acceptable). So I would not attempt to prevent what I might see as a considered act of human suicide; I would indeed be prepared to assist in such an attempted suicide if assistance were needed and asked for and would, in extreme cases, even act to kill a fellow human if I considered that only my decision and my act (or my purposeful inaction) would suffice to end a hopeless and tormented life. In short, I believe that 'mercy killing' is a moral imperative in some cases - human and otherwise.

The sixth commandment 'Thou shalt NOT kill' is very unsatisfactory as it stands. It is admittedly a great deal better than its opposite 'Thou SHALT kill' but that is about all that can be said for it.

If we suppose that life is a peculiarly valuable aspect of the natural world, - that God has breathed life into otherwise non-living matter - then even the killing of harmful (to us) micro-organisms is wrong. They are as much part of the created living world as we are. The commandment, as it has usually been formulated, is indeed a sufficient basis for a Bugs' Rights lobby.

Even assuming that it is meant as 'thou shalt not kill PEOPLE it is a little hollow in its Biblical context - accompanied as it is by reports of the Israelites killing, at God's behest, all and sundry prior occupants of the supposedly Promised Land. Even if the commandment is narrowed down to 'thou shalt not kill fellow Jews' it is still hollow in its Biblical context - there are numerous acts specified in the Old Testament as being capital offences. So even capitally offending fellow Jews had to be killed in God's name.

The attempt to see the commandment as 'you should not commit murder' is not satisfactory as a DIVINE commandment because it is left to human legislators to define what is, and what is not, murder. For example, in Australia two centuries ago, the killing of Aborigines was lawful and was indeed regarded as a legitimate pastime; the law against murder was only applicable to the settlers. Likewise slaves have usually been unprotected by laws against murder. Again, people have been lawfully outlawed - put outside the protection of the law - so that anyone could kill them with legal impunity.

So 'you should not commit murder' is essentially a secular prohibition; it boils down to 'you should not break the law relating to murder currently endorsed by human legislators'.

The best that one can do on the subject of killing is that, generally, it is better to preserve life than to terminate it. How to interpret 'generally' is a matter of opinion, a matter of the prevailing culture.

On this obvious and humble basis, a great many perfectly reasonable people are not pacifists, are not vegans, are not opposed to capital punishment and are ready to accept, subject to safeguards, the practices of chosen abortion and of voluntary euthanasia and,in extreme cases, of mercy killing.

What is really at issue is the false antithesis been 'absolute' and 'relative' in ethical matters.

It is only pious philosophers of the more journalistic kind who make a big thing of ABSOLUTE versus RELATIVE in matters of ethics. It is put about by such people that you either have to have absolute (i.e. exceptionless) rules or you have to be prepared for the non-morality of 'anything goes'. The ordinary person - one who takes a plain view of things - can perfectly well comprehend moral precepts that are simultaneously both absolute (exceptionless) and relative to one's assessment of circumstances.

For example, we can say that 'it is BETTER, other things being equal, to tell truth than to tell lies'. This statement is absolutely true in the sense that nobody of right mind would ever say 'it is WORSE, other things being equal, to tell truth than to tell lies.' But the statement is not only absolute; it is also relative to 'other things' that can properly override the simplistic value of 'truth for its own sake'. In common usage 'telling lies is wrong but there are such things a white lies'.

Similar analysis can be made of other moral values and the plain thinking person does so without difficulty and all the pious exhortation in the world fails to extinguish entirely the common sense plain view. People are neither so bad nor so dumb as many preachers - both secular and religious - seem to think.

or e-mail to stockton.sanday.orkney@zetnet.co.uk