What japes we have to look forward to at Halloween! Bobbing for apples, making pumpkin lanterns, or, er, spending the night in Fred West’s former cell. Thanks to an imaginative charity fundraiser, £75 will get you a bed at the Steelhouse Lane Lock-up in Birmingham, where West Midlands police once held the serial killer. That surely tops the chance to take a selfie with the victims of another notorious sexually motivated murderer, as offered by the Jack the Ripper Museum a few years ago.

This taking of the macabre to the max has, not surprisingly, caused a rumpus. West killed at least 12 young women between the 1960s and 80s, many of whose relatives are still alive. It is hard to dispute the verdict of a local woman who called the event “very distasteful and highly insensitive to the victims’ families”.

But I can already hear the doughty defenders of free expression castigating the “snowflakes” who believe their right not be offended trumps other people’s right to whatever perverted pleasures they can legally and consensually enjoy.

So where do we draw the line between harmless spooky fun and salacious grisliness? Perhaps that is the wrong question. If we were just more thoughtful, we would often step back without needing a line to check us. Would anyone who thought for a minute about how the families of West’s victims might feel about them taking the “unique opportunity” to stay in his cell want to exercise their right to do so? Would anyone who thought about the horrors of murder and mutilation really see having a victim selfie as a fun thing to do? A civilised society gives you the right to be an offensive, insensitive asshole; a civilised person doesn’t use it.

The other side of this coin is that, unfortunately, we don’t have a right not to be offended. When insensitive brutes trample on our feelings, we can do no more than curse their thoughtlessness and try not to allow their callousness to bruise us, painful though it can be.

Often, disputes like this turn into panicked, polarised debates between opposing camps claiming competing rights. But the question is not one of rights, but decency, civility and respect. What’s so scary about that?