The availability of an audience is not, in itself, justification for putting on a spectacle. There are things people would be quite prepared to watch that are illegal to display. There are many more things that the law does not prohibit, but that broadcasters choose not to show. The Jeremy Kyle Show has now joined that number, cancelled by ITV after the death of a participant in the programme. It is the right decision, taken tragically too late.

The 14-year-old show has attracted controversy before. In 2007, a judge described it as “human bear-baiting” in the trial of a man convicted of assault on set. The programme’s producers have subsequently faced many accusations of neglect, manipulation and dereliction of duty towards the people invited to share the most intimate aspects of their private lives with a million-strong daytime audience. Repeats and viral YouTube segments significantly increase the exposure. A vulnerable person can have their life defined – some say ruined – by a single moment of bad behaviour.

The broadcaster’s first defence is that people give their consent to appear on air and might benefit from the experience. The follow-up line is that criticism comes from intellectual snobs who aren’t obliged to watch. The same arguments are deployed in support of other reality programmes – ITV’s hugely popular Love Island among them – accused of neglecting participants’ welfare.

The consent defence is a slippery one when people have no way to fairly judge the risks. The Jeremy Kyle Show needed a steady supply of vulnerable, unhappy people and producers had every incentive to provoke extreme reactions, prey on insecurity and turn a blind eye to mental health problems. Human weakness is TV ratings fuel, and a structure can always be erected to mine it. Cruelty is in the business model. The appetite to consume such content is not specific to any social class or age group, nor is the instinct to recoil from it. Both responses can coexist in the same viewer. The real snobbery is the broadcaster’s presumption that mass entertainment must be prurient to be authentic, as if decency and compassion are middle-class affectations.

There are genuine dilemmas in broadcasting, where challenging material provokes strong reaction or confounds taboo. There are fine judgment calls between art and obscenity; between information and titillation; between challenging convention and gratuitous offence. Decisions about what to permit on screen in those contexts can be tricky. But The Jeremy Kyle Show is not in that category because the whole enterprise was premised on the commodification of misery. The problem is not what appears on screen and the effect on audiences, but what happens off screen – what becomes of the participants, their families, their mental health. It doesn’t much matter if a programme is unedifying to watch. It does matter if the way it treats people looks like abuse.

Boundaries of taste, decency and civility move over time, but the concepts themselves are not ephemeral. And the duty on people who make TV programmes to behave ethically is not diminished just because society has become more permissive and things that once shocked audiences are now quite normal. It is especially hard to know where the line is drawn in a fragmented media environment, with millions of potential online channels catering to every conceivable taste. But that does not excuse mass broadcasters from their unique responsibilities. On the contrary, digital cacophony makes the moments of shared, collective viewing all the more precious. Mass-audience programmes are traditionally part of the fabric of common experience that bind societies together, but they are becoming rarer. In that context, it becomes all the more important that channels with public service mandates keep possession of a moral compass.