Anders Breivik isn't mad - he was a man on a mission There is no dispute that Anders Breivik killed 77 people last July, 56 of them coldly and efficiently with direct shots to the head. Indeed, he is proud of what he did, and has said, with a combination of smugness and defiance, that he wished he could have slaughtered more. The dispute which has arisen centres on his state of mind at the time he pulled the trigger. One psychiatric report declared that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and was therefore not responsible for his actions; a later assessment came to the opposite conclusion, that he knew perfectly well what he was doing. Both opinions will be aired at the trial in Norway which started yesterday. A diagnosis of schizophrenia would carry the implication that the man was entangled by delusions and hallucinations which controlled his behaviour. Such was the defence advanced before the trial of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, in 1981. It was quickly thrown out by Mr Justice Boreham. One must hope the trial judge in Oslo will take a similar view, for Breivik's reasoning may be abhorrent, but it is sequential and organised. He has been on the periphery of a society of which he should have formed a part, obeying only his personal code (in opposition to the rest of the community), bereft of any sense of guilt, with a low tolerance of frustration, determined to gratify his own ideas whatever the cost to others. He has had his conscience ripped out. Nevertheless, anti-social behaviour is not a mental disease, however repugnant its consequences. This is at the heart of what constitutes criminal responsibility and the exercise of free will. The concept of freedom of choice, the basis for every moral edifice and all notions of conscience, is man-made and man-imposed. Morality is the civilising influence which mankind has erected to shield us from the vacuum of chaotic nature, where blunt caprice prevails. Breivik appears, almost by his own admission, to have rejected this civilising morality, and replaced it with an independent freedom of will beholden to no system, and all in obedience to a perverted sense of duty. The jurors will be the ultimate arbiters of his moral responsibility and of what the community will allow. They will have to disguise their disgust in order to determine coolly that he must not be held insane simply because the killings were despicable, or that he must have been mad to have done what he did. That is a circular argument (res ipsa loquitur - "the thing speaks for itself") and deeply fallacious; on such shifting logic almost any conviction for murder would be impossible. As the American criminologist Jack Levin has put it, what is sickening is not necessarily sick. It also confuses "madness" (a philosophical notion) with "insanity" (a legal term). Breivik is obviously aberrant, but he was throughout resourceful, determined, careful, purposeful; "mad" if you like, but perfectly sane in his ghastly ambition and his deliberations as to how to achieve it. Even worse, his public preening suggests that he was nurturing his self-esteem, that he needed to assert his will by encountering obstacles and dealing with them successfully. He probably felt elated when his task had been accomplished. The court can only, of course, deal with the facts as they are presented; but one must hope that a by-product of the jury's verdict will be the final humiliation and banishment from society of this wilful and deeply unpleasant man. Brian Masters is the author of 'Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen" (Arrow)