Does community come only at the cost of limiting freedom? The instinctive reply is so obviously "yes" that it hardly seems worth debating at all. If we live with other people (partner, parents, offspring, friends or strangers) we inevitably have to compromise and establish rules. Those rules restrict both you and me. Worse, we often have to live by the rules of the person with the lowest tolerance and are thus forever playing a kind of limbo, bending over backwards to get under their bar. Most of us yearn for community but if cashing in our freedom is part of the deal, most of us prefer to give up the chase.

Before rushing to that conclusion, though, we would have to agree on a couple of terms. "Community" I take to mean (I concede it's a very favourable interpretation) a space of trust where humans give up belongings in order to gain belonging. And, borrowing from John Milton, I think "freedom" is different to "license", and believe that only a moral sword can separate them. It’s a moral sword because in that separation we arrive at a definition of what "good" might mean. I don't believe in the contemporary definition of freedom as the removal of all rules. We are finite and fallen, and our freedom is necessarily precarious and endangered. Given those definitions (you might say I've tilted them in my favour, but hey), the question appears less obvious. Community might limit license, but not, I think, freedom.

And whilst it's true that there are frictions and claustrophobias, concessions and compromises when we're in company, something else also emerges: "the good life". Communal living inculcates moral values almost subconsciously. It's a place where we are forced to become moral beings. We come across other yardsticks which we're surprised to find both more demanding and also more satisfying than our own. The rules other people live by aren't always affronts to our own liberty but sometimes meticulous strategies to protect it. Not only that, we come across our own failings so regularly (weird, mine rarely appear when I'm on my own) that we become less conceited, less ghettoised than when we were in our personalised bubble.

I'm not saying that people who live on their own are immoral beings (actually, as I've just hinted, it takes more moral honesty than most of us are capable of).  What I am suggesting is that community might actually be one of the very first places we should go in order to learn what the nectar of true freedom tastes like. Freedom can only be appreciated by connoisseurs of ethics and communitarians have very sophisticated palates.

The question also needs to be inverted for us to appreciate the other end of the extreme: Does our modern notion of freedom only come at the cost of destroying community? To which I would say the answer is very clearly "yes". Because infinite freedom means we will never deny ourselves. We won't give up anything for anyone else. The idol in this consumers' temple is called Choice. It's something that politicians offer as evidence that the electorate has been liberated, as evidence that we're empowered clients of a responsive bureaucracy: "choice for parents", "choice for patients" and so on.

I can see why all this has come about; no doubt you can too. Choice is indeed a very good thing if we have the scales to weigh up the options and come up with an answer. The trouble is that we no longer have any scales, any criterion to know whether we've made the right choice or not. In demanding that we, autonomous individuals, be the only arbiter of what we decide to do, we rob ourselves of endorsement, recognition, approval. We have no way of knowing whether we've done right or wrong. And so, fearing the worst, we drastically curtail the consequences of any choice we dare to make. We'll only make a decision if we're assured it can be quickly revised, wiped, remade. Our aversion to decision making is most clear in the fluidity of modern arrangements. Everything and everyone is mobile, so you'd be as well to avoid get stuck in one place, with one person: "something else may come up, so let's keep our options open, we'll talk later".

Choice was originally linked, etymologically, to heresy. Now you don't have to believe in heresy to appreciate that limitless choice renders our lives meaningless. If every option is always open to us we're not actually living at all, at least as I understand the notion of what life means. We're not consciously becoming responsible for the decisions we make but are infantilised by our insistence on retaining choice, regardless of what we have said and done before. We can't grow up. It's a world which, from the outset, precludes permanence, loyalty, patience and satisfaction. We want a guarantee we can get our money back even before we’ve put our plastic on the counter.

As so often happens, what we eagerly grab turns out to be not what we want. We longed for choice, were given it in abundance, and are now paralysed by the magnitude of things we're asked to decide. The negotiation of meaningless choices which characterises my life – which tiles?, which toothpaste?, which magazine?, Which? – isn't a liberation but a time-consuming tyranny. That is the real cost of sharing nothing with other people: you have to do everything yourself. Maybe so many choices haven't made us irresponsible (sorry if I'm contradicting myself). Perhaps it's that we've had to become responsible for every miniscule decision and we simply can’t find the time (or, in many cases, the money).

So the counter-intuitive answer might actually be, "No, community doesn’t limit freedom". Without belonging I don't think we can ever be truly free. Sorry to bang on about etymology, but freedom is linked to words which mean "dear", "beloved" and "friend". It's a word which only makes sense if we know where we belong and to whom: if we know what our community is and who lives in it. In a true community, people's freedom isn't limited by decree, but invested by assent. Because we belong, we entrust our choices and freedoms to other people, and they do likewise. You start taking decisions on their behalf and vice versa. And the miracle of community is that what you thought you had given up you actually gain. I've heard that before someplace.

Tobias Jones is a writer and broadcaster. His most recent book is Utopian Dreams: In Search of a Good Life. An updated edition of his previous book, The Dark Heart of Italy, has just been published by Faber & Faber.