Think of your most treasured possessions. You might be imagining your new car, or your mobile phone or tablet, your game console, your house, surfboard, bicycle, first edition of Dickens (not bad!), or your model train set. All material possessions – tangible, visible, saleable, heritable, solid and stable, for yours and my admiration. At least that's what our culture encourages you to focus on. But in that case you would forget something far more important.

What about that invisible, intangible, priceless, inalienable, ethereal possession that ranks far above all the others – your good name? Wouldn’t you rather lose every material possession than have others think badly of you? I don’t mean a few people – that’s unavoidably true of all of us. Nor do I mean that anyone thinks badly of you in some light or trivial way – say, that you are known for being stingy with restaurant tips. I am thinking of the case where you have an all-round bad reputation as a person, or where on one or more serious matters you are harshly judged by others. Even if the reputation is deserved, being so reputed is still painful to all but the most hardened of us.

Everyone treasures their reputation, and so they should. Being thought well of – at least not thought ill of – is not supposed to be an invitation to smug self-satisfaction. It is about external reinforcement of your sense of self-worth, about not being a scandal to others, about being, instead, a model for others, an inspiration to their own virtue. There’s the rub. As I said on a recent radio programme, the best way of ‘virtue-signalling’ is by being virtuous. What we really want is a good reputation that is earned, for anything less is – as with material possessions – something endowed with the advantages of theft over honest toil.