It's far easier to attack "them" than examine the deceit, delusions and cultural certainties that constitute "us" – whether by acknowledging the depredations of the British empire or exposing its legacy of structural racism.
Future policymakers will have to contend with what constitutes "us" and "them" in existing societies and how we collectively create a sense of group belonging.
Accounts from behind the closed doors of negotiating session described tense exchanges between oil-producing countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, and a rapidly constituted US- and Europe-backed High Ambition Coalition, which kept up the pressure for a strong temperature goal and regular reviews of emission-cutting plans.
These ends are public, the res publica that constitutes us as a common people.
Given this understanding, however, Lilla concludes that, in current America politics, everyone is a liberal: "We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn't constitute us and that together we legitimately govern ourselves".
The soul constitutes us as human beings; the spirit makes us religious, the flesh irreligious, the soul neither the one nor the other" (CWE 66:52).
Yet he worries that our 'smeared-out selves' may lose coherence as the relations that constitute us are increasingly multiplied and scattered among a vast and expanding web of networked channels.
But because our values, intentions and actions are always open to revision, all experienced realities also express opportunities for responsively altering the character and disposition of the relational dynamics that constitute us as persons and as communities.
Indeed, if morality were grounded in feeling, it would be arbitrary: God could have constituted us so that we would get from vice the pleasurable, calm feelings of approval that we now (allegedly) get from virtue (M 29 625).
On her view, the property that distinguishes the persons we are from the human animals that constitute us is a form of self-consciousness that she calls the "first-person perspective" (2000: ch. 3).
