I’m not the type of person who refuses to watch certain television shows on principle. I’m something of an aficionado of bad taste, so I often go out of my way to find it. And quite frankly, my refusing to watch a show is, to quote the old joke, like wetting yourself in a dark suit: It gives you a nice, warm feeling, but nobody notices.

But it seems like FOX is doing everything it can to put me in that dark suit. The network has a new reality show that isn’t just tasteless. It’s wrong.

The premise of “Does Someone Have to Go” is that a company is put under control of its employees for 48 hours and the group decides which one of them should be fired. According to the usual dictates of reality television, there’s lots of backbiting and drama before someone gets knifed. (I don’t actually know if that’s the end result; I haven’t and won’t watch the show and for the early reviews, TV critics were not allowed to see the actual ending, so it’s possible the whole thing was a charade.)

“Does Someone Have to Go” is the latest of a long line of such reality-show obscenities on FOX. It aired what has become the gold standard for tasteless TV, 2004’s “The Swan,” in which a group of women considered “ugly” were given plastic surgery and other goodies and the most successful competed in a beauty pageant at the end of the season. Never watched that one, either.

But I did watch “Temptation Island,” which premiered in 2001 and ran for three seasons. In that one, a bunch of hot couples were put in an isolated spot together to see which couples would cheat on each other. I only watched it because I was assigned to do a local reaction story to it, since before the premiere it had been the focus of no small nationwide controversy. So I lined up clerics and counselors, asked them to watch it and interviewed them about it afterwards.

It’s the only time I actually apologized to sources for interviewing them. I felt like I had to shower after watching it. And in addition, it was deadly dull. It was the longest hour of television I’ve ever watched.

Criticizing the tastefulness of reality TV is a bit like complaining about the skill of an ax murderer, but shows like these aren’t just in questionable taste. Of course, nobody’s ever accused FOX of being highbrow. But these are shows that, even more than a lot of reality TV, actually are based on treating people like crap. They violate the most basic moral standards of human decency. And they do it blatantly.

And you don’t hear a lot of public outcry about it (although there was some about “Temptation Island,” hence my story, but that was years ago). I find that interesting, because there are so many people these days who base their whole public persona on the role of self-appointed Guardian of Morality.

Sometimes, the guardians are on one side of an issue about which reasonable people can disagree, like abortion. Not every anti-abortion person is reasonable, but there are some, and there are actually good moral arguments on both sides of the question. There are unreasonable people on the pro-choice side as well, but one seldom hears from them. Any reasonable pro-choice person knows that every abortion is a tragedy and no sane person wants women to have abortions. It’s always the best bad option.

In other cases, the Guardians of Morality are simply unreasonable. I have yet to hear a single coherent argument against gay rights. They either come down to “God says it’s wrong” or “it’s icky,” neither of which is going to convince somebody who doesn’t agree in the first place.

But something like “Does Someone Have to Go” oozes up out of the muck and the Guardians are strangely silent. Never mind that it’s entertainment that plays with folks’ livelihoods, with their very ability to survive. Never mind that it’s unbelievably cruel. Never mind that on a moral level, it’s just not very far from a real-life “Hunger Games.”

Granted, nobody’s rising to FOX’s defense, either. But the silence from those who are so publicly proud of their morality is deafening. It’s the same roaring silence one hears when Kim Kardashian has five-minute marriage, something that does far more damage to the role of that institution than gay marriage ever could (which it doesn’t, anyway).

You can argue that it’s just a TV show and really doesn’t have much impact on people other than those onscreen. That’s true, but if we’re going to make moral judgments on things that don’t directly affect us, this would seem to be a good time.

But the Guardians don’t seem to make any moral pronouncements on other things that do affect people. The huge income disparity in this country, which is ripping it apart, has a moral dimension, much as those on the long end of that stick would say otherwise. There’s a whole political movement in this country, the Libertarians, based on the idea that we have no moral duty to take care of each other. And in a time when there’s real suffering in this country, that’s tantamount to saying some people deserve to suffer even though the reasons are beyond their control. That’s wrong.

Just like “The Swan” and “Temptation Island,” “Does Someone Have to Go” will last for two or three seasons and once people who watch it as a break from torturing puppies get bored, it will sink back into the ooze. But what is it about our culture that could even define such a thing as “entertainment?” How morally coarse are we that this excrescence is even allowed to exist, much less that companies will pay to have their products hawked while it’s on?

The Guardians love to point to others as the source of the moral rot in this country. It’s always somebody else who’s causing it. But Shakespeare knew better and stated it pithily: “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”