Moaner Cyd Eekie meant well on Thought for the Day when speaking about the treatment of women. No one should treat women disrespectfully, unfairly and certainly not with cruelty or violence. Moaner was, however, supposed to be speaking from a religious perspective as this is the requirement of TFTD. Of course we all know that it is possible to contrive ethical theories according to entirely secular criteria – with what hope of success being, as they say, a matter of some debate. But what is surely illegitimate is to conflate terminology: precisely what Moaner Cyd did in her talk.

The abstract secular vocabulary of human rights was all mixed up with religious notions about care, love and respect. The result was bound to be incoherent.

Why have religious people – Christians, Jews and now it appears even some Muslims – given up basing their morality on traditional deontological ethics – that is ethics which derive from revealed absolutes such as the will of God and God’s law – and taken up instead the relativistic, utilitarian vocabulary involving  abstract rights and consequentialist theories? Historically, this always leads to undesirable consequences such as the French revolutionary terror and the atrocities and genocides of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Ethics must – and traditionally have been – based instead on habit, manners and practices rooted in a transcendental reality. And usually accompanied by rituals.