In a national community, not to be able to situate oneself as a -bearer of a shared narrative is bad for mental and moral health. The civic community should help me to answer the question, “Who am I?” even if my eventual answer entails some criticism and even a degree of detachment from that story. Along with the formation of identity goes the acquiring of criteria for defining a shared good, for some range of non-arbitrary values I can cherish.

The human poverty of secular liberalism can already be inferred from the results of contemporary secularisation. In modern England, moral discourse is in danger of becoming a parody of infantile egoism. What I want becomes what I need, which in turn becomes my 'right'. The moral life becomes a matter of wishes, preferences, needs and desires.

It is true that the moral life begins with desire. But such desire, as Plato argued, is not the desire that leads us to pursue “enlightened” self-interest, in the form of the hedonistic calculus that asks how I can maximise pleasure. The desire that impels the moral life is, rather, -desire for the good because it is beautiful. To dignify with the term “ethical” the expression of preference by reference to wants contravenes this principle. In terms of moral aesthetics, it is also ugly. That can be seen in the way typically secular liberal ethicists find it difficult to avoid the justification of moral pathologies: for example, the choices of those who freely contract to inflict physical pain on each other for the purposes of sadistic satisfaction.