I want to return to the point about the primacy of demeanour and agency in all this, to the idea of how a person actually regards others, their attitude, how they speak, how they listen, as opposed to how they reflectively express themselves. Gaita himself has expressed discomfort with the ‘preciousness’ of a word like ‘precious’, preferring the less precious ‘sacred’ as applied to human beings. ‘Inalienable preciousness’ is the term we see in Mulhall’s question. As I said earlier, such words belong to a very particular register of intimacy outside of which they evaporate rapidly. But the term ‘sacred’ fares little better; indeed, most articulations are going to start sounding precious through continued use outside the exchanges of intimacy and even they can grow stale.