It’s the buffet of freedom. Photo by Brad West on Unsplash
Welcome back to Daily Conquest. Please click the heart icon if you enjoy this issue.
Last time, discussed the right of Life, the first of the Big Three unalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. It’s time to wrap up this discussion with a few words about Liberty and pursuit of Happiness so that we can move on to other topics.
I almost wrote “more current topics”, but though the Declaration was drafted and signed in 1776 it is always current, and this is far from the last time we will recur to the Declaration (and the Constitution) here at Daily Conquest. The principles set forth in these founding documents should always be top of mind when considering matters of government, politics, and public policy.
Liberty
What is liberty? What does it mean to say we have an unalienable right to liberty? Rather than diving back into Locke and other thinkers, I’ll share my own sense of what liberty means in a political context — and invite you to consider what it means to you.
If I had to give a brief definition, I’d say liberty is freedom of action. That is, the freedom to act as you see fit without any improper external constraints and without having to ask anyone’s permission. Liberty implies choosing your own priorities, setting your own agenda, and not being unduly interfered with as you pursue your own ends.
That doesn’t mean that liberty is unbounded. It is a right, and like all rights, it has proper boundaries. Your liberty ends at the point that it interferes with someone else’s liberty. And, like all rights, liberty come with its own corresponding responsibilities.
Liberty should always be exercised with judgment and discretion. One of my maxims is that just because you have a right to do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. To give a silly illustration, if you go to a restaurant and order the buffet, that may give you the right to eat every bit of food on the buffet table, but it is probably not a good idea to do so, for any number of reasons. Judgment and discretion should caution you to exercise your right of access to the buffet table responsibly — don’t gorge yourself, don’t pile up your plate with more than you can eat, try not to waste food, etc. Don’t abuse the right. Don’t try to maximize your own advantage at the expense of your neighbors (or, in this example, fellow diners). Otherwise, there will be no buffet in the future.
The same mindset should apply to the exercise of your far more serious rights in society. This gets to the idea of responsible liberty or ordered liberty, which may be a good topic for a future edition.
For now, let’s simply note that the preservation and continued free exercise of our rights implies some internal sense of restraint and morality and shared mutual respect among the people of a commonwealth. This is what George Washington was getting at in his farewell address when he said, “It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”
A free people must be, on the whole, a moral people, or they will not remain free very long. We don’t have to be perfect, either as individuals or as a nation. But we do have to strive for the good, even if we don’t always reach it. We must not only know our rights, but also know and fulfill our mutual responsibilities. Otherwise, it all falls apart.
We each have to do our part to keep the buffet of freedom going.
One more point on liberty. In the context of the Declaration, the American colonists were concerned about their liberty being interfered with by the British government. One of the paradoxes of government is that governments are, per the Declaration itself, instituted to secure the rights of the people. Yet governments themselves often become the greatest threats to the liberty of their own citizens. Finding the sweet spot of having a government strong enough to protect our liberties, yet not so strong as to take them away is one of the eternal struggles of self-governance.
Pursuit of Happiness
This brings us to the pursuit of happiness. My own thought is that the right to pursue happiness is closely related to that of liberty.1 It seems to me that what the Declaration suggests is that we have the right to pursue our own ends, not those of some ruler or government imposed upon us. That we can each determine for ourselves what course in life might best secure our happiness, and then develop our abilities and direct our energies to pursue that path as best we can, respecting always the rights of others and minding our own responsibilities as free and self-governing citizens.
I’ll here quote The American Creed2, an informative book by Forrest Church:
“Happiness by itself is not a right; in the Declaration of Independence only the “pursuit of happiness” is bequeathed by God. Here too there are limits. When the happiness of some is pursued at the expense of others, the common good is violated. Should one person trample on the rights of another in the pursuit of his or her ends, or the majority deny rights to a minority, government has an obligation to intercede — or stop interceding as Jefferson would have it — in order to redress the balance.”3
The unalienable right is to pursue happiness. There is no right to happiness, nor any guarantee that we will achieve happiness by whatever means we choose to pursue it. And the government’s role is to protect our right to pursue happiness, not to guarantee that we will reach it or to impose someone else’s vision of happiness upon us.
This, it seems to me, is an important distinction, and one that supports the American value of equality of opportunity while precluding the distinctly un-American concept of equality of outcome (which has been rebranded these days as “equity"4).
That is, the pursuit of happiness is an individual right, and we may not all pursue that goal in the same way, but we all have an equal right to pursue happiness by our own best lights. On the other hand, demanding an equality of outcome necessarily implies that someone else has decided for all of us what outcome we should want and receive. But that would violate our unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.
Self-governance also seems to me to be implied in a right to the pursuit of happiness. Subjects of an absolute monarch, tyrant, or dictator cannot easily pursue their own happiness. Likewise, the totalitarian idea that the people of a nation exist to serve the state, not the other way around, erases or severely constrains the pursuit of happiness.
Happiness as used here does not mean the mere pursuit of pleasure, wealth, status, the latest iPhone or what have you. As Carol V. Hamilton writes, Jefferson most likely took the phrase “pursuit of happiness” from John Locke. In his 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke asserts:
The necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the foundation of liberty. As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness; so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty.
Locke makes a distinction between chimerical ideas of happiness and the true and solid happiness that is a necessary foundation of liberty. Thomas Jefferson certainly read Locke’s essay and Jefferson is probably alluding to this latter sense of happiness in the Declaration.5
Carol Hamilton’s article traces this concept of happiness back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, concluding:
Properly understood, therefore, when John Locke, Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Jefferson wrote of “the pursuit of happiness,” they were invoking the Greek and Roman philosophical tradition in which happiness is bound up with the civic virtues of courage, moderation, and justice. Because they are civic virtues, not just personal attributes, they implicate the social aspect of eudaimonia6. The pursuit of happiness, therefore, is not merely a matter of achieving individual pleasure.
Obviously, one can make a deep dive into what “pursuit of happiness” means, and many have. But we’ll leave it there for now.
Closing Thoughts
Church, in his book, notes “To Jefferson, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were interdependent. “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time,” he wrote. “The hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”7 Our unalienable rights, or at least the Big Three that made the cut for the Declaration’s preamble, are a package deal.
Church continues, “In Enlightenment thought, happiness was a practical virtue; it could be neither pursued nor practiced apart from the common good. Yet its attainment depended upon liberty.”8 It's all connected, baby.
To me, these are the important takeaways:
Our unalienable, Creator-given rights are interrelated. It is difficult, if not impossible, to exercise any particular right when any other right is infringed.
Our rights come with responsibilities, and with a connection to the common good. We should therefore strive to be conscientious in the exercise of our liberties. It’s not anything goes.
Government has a mandate from the people to protect our rights. Indeed, that is why we have governments at all. But we must always keep a careful eye on government lest it become the destroyer of what it was created to protect.
What Do You Think?
I’m over here quoting John Locke and George Washington and name-dropping Greek philosophers, but don’t get the impression that I’m any kind of authority on these topics. Or, really, anything that we cover in future editions of Daily Conquest.
I’m not writing as a voice from atop Mount Olympus, but as someone interested in better understanding America’s founding principles and how those relate to our lives today and the world around us. (Among other topics we’ll get to later.)
I’m not a historian or a constitutional scholar or a political philosopher. I assume you’re probably not either. Most of us aren’t. But I strongly believe that thinking about, discussing, and trying to better understand our rights, the principles of good government, and other important ideas should not and cannot be the exclusive domain of experts. These are our rights we’ve been discussing here. Rights we all have.
Most of us — including me, though I am a political science nerd — don’t spend a lot of time pondering the finer points of America’s founding documents, the proper ends of government, and the like. But enduring principles of America's founding are our birthright, our security, and our responsibility to understand, maintain, strengthen, and hand down intact to the next generation.9
So it is in that spirit that I enjoy sharing things I’ve read, ideas I’ve encountered, and thoughts that occur to me. I hope you find something useful, interesting, or even inspiring in each issue of Daily Conquest. And I hope you’ll share your own thoughts, reactions, ideas, and suggestions and add to the conversation!
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That’s all for now. Expect the next issue of Daily Conquest sooner than you think. Until then, Faithful Readers, be of good cheer and wake up each morning ready to conquer the day!
And, as we’ll see below, Thomas Jefferson agrees with me. Which is nice.
Forrest Church, The American Creed: A Biography of the Declaration of Independence (St. Martin’s Press, 2002)
Church, p. 36.
Equity is a term of law which has, unfortunately, been wordjacked by the political Left and given a false and distorted meaning. Redefining and mutilating the meaning of words to advance their ideological agenda is a favorite leftist occupation. We’ll discuss that another day.
For the proper and historical meaning of equity see https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/equity
In law, the term "equity" refers to a particular set of remedies and associated procedures involved with civil law. These equitable doctrines and procedures are distinguished from "legal" ones. While legal remedies typically involve monetary damages, equitable relief typically refers to injunctions, specific performance, or vacatur. A court will typically award equitable remedies when a legal remedy is insufficient or inadequate. For example, courts will typically award equitable relief for a claim which involves a particular or unique piece of real estate, or if the plaintiff requests specific performance.
I know I said I wasn’t going to dive into Locke again. But he’s hard to avoid on this topic.
From Carol Hamilton’s article: “The Greek word for “happiness” is eudaimonia. In the passage above, Locke is invoking Greek and Roman ethics in which eudaimonia is linked to aretê, the Greek word for “virtue” or “excellence.”
Church, p. 36.
Ibid.
Well, at least for my American readers. I know some of you live elsewhere! :)