IAN BRADY – is he mad or bad? Why can’t he be both? Last week the tribunal to decide whether the Moors Murderer should remain in a psychiatric hospital or be transferred to prison was treated to a barrow-load of technical vocabulary.

Is he a psychopath – that is someone with no trace of human sympathy and quite unable to understand that other people are human with genuine feelings? Such a man could easily murder children “as an existential experiment” as Brady said he did. For “existential experiment” read “for fun”. Or is he psychotic, a schizophrenic with delusions which come upon him unbidden and beyond control?

Schizophrenia is a notoriously vague term.

I recall my frustration on the clinical psychology course at Liverpool when I asked for a definition of schizophrenia and was told there isn’t one. “Schizophrenia displays itself in a combination of any nine symptoms, any three of which constitute the syndrome.” I remember the phrase as clearly as eight eights make 64.

Forget Cracker, clinical and criminal psychology are not precise. They are attempts to express complicated behaviour which we don’t understand. And fashions in so-called understanding change constantly.

Someone now diagnosed as schizophrenic might at one time have been said to be possessed by devils, inspired by God or enchanted by elves. The present definitions of the condition are no more reliable.

They simply reflect our altered philosophical prejudices as we have exchanged a world thought to be governed by spirit and interfered with by supernatural powers for a world defined by materialistic and biochemical science.

What’s actually going on is anyone’s guess and to pretend to have precise knowledge in these matters is arrogant folly. You think you have a definition of madness? Hang around a few years and a different definition will come along.

The practical problem is what to do with a man who murders children for fun. Many are in no doubt: string him up.

Now we have no death penalty and others say that society must not stoop to Brady’s level, that he must be treated humanely and that if we desire to see him punished by death we are, as I read in the paper this week, “Giving up the high moral ground.”

But what is moral here? If Brady had been hanged back in the 1960s, his crimes would now be a closed book. What has his prolonged incarceration achieved? It has perpetuated the evil he did when he murdered those children.

First and most cruel, his continued taunting of the families of the victims adds to their agony. Treating Brady “humanely” means he remains free to mock those he has caused to suffer. That is, we are complicit in treating the guilty Brady humanely but his innocent victims inhumanely. Secondly, the cost of his incarceration, treatment and the endless inquiries and tribunals by which he orchestrates his own sick publicity are a wicked drain on the public purse. The money spent on Brady might be spent on a new operating theatre or a municipal library.

What matters is justice, and the just punishment for unspeakable crimes such as Brady’s is death lawfully administered after fair and due process conducted in public.

Don’t lecture me about “the high moral ground.” British society surrendered the high moral ground when it abolished capital punishment.