The issue of knowledge and ignorance is by no means mysterious. To advance any sort of serious proposition without a firm grasp of etymology and grammar is at best a dangerous and frequently a ruinous venture; I cite respectively the use of the term "dumb" to mean both stupid and deprived of the power of speech and the horrifying frequency of sentences where pronouns cannot be connected to their parent nouns; and even more often, though this is more a matter of aesthetics than comprehension, I mourn the passing of the proper use of "but" as a conjunction. These are serious problems enough between honest if incompetent communicators but in public discourse, commercial, political and social, they are compounded by a pancopia of dishonesty from false extrapolation to downright lying, by way of the antithesis of omission and embellishment.

In the spirit in which they are offered and framed, here are ten propositions rather than Commandments:

1. Set a more exacting code of private conduct than you can readily observe and accord due respect to the private codes so set by others.
2. Do not confuse private and public codes of conduct nor private feelings with public statements; only break the law for the public good and then do so openly; and never break a rule by accident.
3. Judge without condemnation.
4. Remember that except in matters of ethics, public activity involves compromise in the use of time and space and in the degree of latitude where individually acceptable rights are being exercised simultaneously.
5. In matters of importance always say the same thing to all parties, preferably simultaneously.
6. Speak out for the weak and act for the defenceless, remembering that passivity or silence in the face of unsocial or intolerant acts or speech constitutes public consent.
7. In matters of public and private concern, nothing is too big nor too small.
8. Be sceptical of any statement rendered in the passive, indirectly quoted, unattributed or attributed to uncited sources.
9. There are many more kinds of literacies or competences than reading, writing and counting to be acquired and respected including: clarity of expression and acuteness of comprehension, subtlety, style, coherence, balance and grace. After venality, risk illiteracy is the greatest cause of bad public policy and of private misery.
10. Never confuse irony with sarcasm nor scepticism with cynicism.

The objection to them, as to the Moses Ten, is that they say nothing of equality or ecology. In these matters I defer to John Rawls' "Difference Principle" which states that inequalities are only acceptable where they improve the lot of the least advantaged and to his principles of justice between generations. These, it seems to me, are at once more penetrating and subtle than socialist theories of redistribution and they deserve much more attention as we approach the 21st Century than they have received in this.

Were I to adopt the New Testament precedent of précis I would confine myself to: "do as you would be done by". To have defined terms would have made the pronouncements (and this article) much too long but they are written for people of goodwill rather than for bar-room lawyers or professional moral philosophers - a case of a suspect dichotomy - and though I hope that they will last as long and be loved as much as the Decalogue has been feared I wish even more that they were not needed.