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Opinion | What did the founders mean by the pursuit of happiness?
The authors of our founding document were deadly serious about a goal we might see as whimsical.
By Timothy Taylor
When the five-person committee that drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence declared it to be “self-evident” that there was a right to “the pursuit of Happiness,” what manner of happiness did they have in mind?
In a declaration explaining why the signers felt compelled to commit treason against their existing government and to prevent “the establishment of an absolute Tyranny,” it seems unlikely that they were foreshadowing the whistling cheeriness of the 1988 Bobby McFerrin hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
When you are announcing that you “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” for the purpose of fighting a Revolutionary War, it seems unlikely that they were thinking of the giddy, throbbing happiness of the 1986 Beastie Boys hit: “You gotta fight for your right to party.”
The authors of the declaration — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston — were not being playful, whimsical or ironic. They were deadly serious about “the pursuit of happiness.”
Drawing on a long philosophical tradition going back to ancient Greece, they believed that happiness was the result of living a virtuous life. Franklin wrote that “virtue and happiness are mother and daughter.” Jefferson later wrote: “Happiness is the aim of life. Virtue is the foundation of happiness.”
Naturally, any self-respecting modern American will quickly stand up and declare: “No virtue-monger gets to tell me what cookie-cutter set of rules I am obligated to follow.”
For 21st century Americans, this notion of happiness as virtue may seem self-contradictory. After all, isn’t virtue almost by definition dry and boring: that is, about discipline and abstemiousness, not the freedoms of fun and pleasure?
But as understood by the authors of the declaration, happiness isn’t about the feels. Instead, in a tradition going back to Aristotle, virtue was understood to be developed through a lifetime of practice. The goal is a deeper and richer satisfaction gained as a person grows into a full and flourishing existence. It’s about taking seriously the idea that you can pursue a version of your best self.
Of course, the pursuit of happiness may not succeed. Real life is messy. Personal goals can change. Families can quarrel. Marriages and friendships can crumble. Health and finances can go sour. Happiness, virtue and flourishing are never guaranteed.
The Nobel-prize winning novelist V.S. Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad in 1932 and lived there for 18 years before receiving a scholarship to Oxford and moving to the United Kingdom, offered a paean to “the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness” in a 1991 essay, in which he wrote:
“Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition.
“It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.
“It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”
The Declaration of Independence proclaims the “Right of the People … to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Americans have disagreed for 250 years over how best to enunciate the foundational principles of their government and how to organize its powers, and it seems right and proper to me that such disagreement should continue. But the lodestar of such discussions is that people have a “self-evident” and “unalienable” right to pursue their own concept of their own happiness. The concept was radical then, and remains so today.
Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul.
