There’s a global morality gap — and it’s getting wider | 10 February 2016

Michael Hanlon, the science writer, has died at the age of 51. He was the science editor at the Daily Mail, and also wrote for the Independent, the Telegraph and The Spectator. A collection of his articles can be found here. In 2013, he wrote the following piece for this magazine, in which he asked why it was that some nations are moving forward on gay and women’s rights, while others are moving backwards. 

First World, Third World, East, West, North and South; every few years economists come up with yet another supposedly more acceptable way of slicing humanity into manageable chunks. Mostly these great divides are riven by wealth; sometimes (RIP Second World) by ideology.

But I think it’s time to name a new divide, a more fundamental, more puzzling one — a split between worlds that will define the 21st century much as the Iron Curtain defined the 20th. I am talking about the morality gap.