‘Pursuit of happiness’ meant virtue, not pleasure, to the Founders

The Declaration of Independence declares our unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Most of us understand life and liberty, but the pursuit of happiness hardly seems like a right. Nor does it seem governments are instituted to secure our happiness. When is the last time the federal government made you feel happy? But the Declaration of Independence doesn’t use happiness like we would use it today. It means something very specific. Understanding that meaning of happiness makes the right and its importance makes sense. Happiness is not good vibes or wellness. It is virtue.

About a year ago, I got an email saying the “phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’ has led many down a path that is not aligned with biblical principles.” It argued that although happiness originally meant people “should be free to pursue their own economic well-being,” the phrase could cause citizens “to believe it’s acceptable to prioritize their own happiness and develop a sense of entitlement to self-gratification.” I don’t doubt that some of us have replaced happiness with pleasure (i.e., self-gratification) or that happiness had an economic component in 1776. But happiness meant much more than just economic well-being. It was above all a moral claim.

The Founding Fathers were shaped by classical history and philosophy, Christianity, and liberalism. Aristotle, Augustine, John Locke, and many others like them all influenced the Founders. Classical ethics, Christianity, and liberalism all focused on the importance of happiness. Plato argued everything we do is to achieve happiness and we don’t need anything other than happiness (sorry, John Lennon). Aristotle agreed, but added that the best way to be happy is to achieve a life of internal and external excellence. We should all strive to live a good life, including good thinking, good actions, and good possessions. Aristotle calls this good life eudaimonia.  He argues that achieving eudaimonia is the goal of ethics and of life. Modern translations typically render eudaimonia as “flourishing” or “well-being.” Translations in 1776 often translated eudaimonia as “happiness.”

Christianity built on and modified the classical position. St. Augustine agreed that all humans pursue happiness. He offered a different definition of happiness, though. In “On the Good Life,” he wrote, “[h]appy is he who has God.” Having God entails knowing, contemplating, and loving God. We enjoy God and use all other things as a means to enjoying Him. Or, as I grew up learning, the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. That catechism echoes Augustine and the theologians that developed his ideas further, theologians like Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. The Founders encountered this idea in both church and state.

The English jurist William Blackstone summarized natural law in a way foreshadowing the Declaration’s statement. Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England” was one of the sources the Founders cited most frequently.  In his “Commentaries,” Blackstone argued that all natural law could be summarized in the precept “that man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness.” Blackstone explicitly tied nature, virtue, and happiness together in a way that mirrors both the Classical and Christian traditions and the Declaration of Independence.

Blackstone argued God designed humanity so that we need “no other prompter to inquire after and pursue the rule of right, but only our own self love.” Our happiness is “so inseparably interwoven [with] the laws of eternal justice” that we cannot attain happiness “but by observing” the laws of eternal justice. The pursuit of happiness is thus “the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law.” The branches of ethics and law “amount to no more than demonstrating that this or that action tends to man’s real happiness.” Blackstone’s natural law statements cite Locke and make arguments echoing Locke’s.

Adam Smith similarly united liberalism, happiness, and virtue. Thomas Hobbes and his followers argued that people were basically selfish and that “good” just meant “that which people desire.” In his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith countered that people are social, so making other people happy makes us happy. Our social instinct bridges the gap between self-interest and concern for others. Buying and selling goods can be both virtuous and in our self-interest: We support ourselves and provide others with the means to support themselves. We become virtuous through examining ourselves and acting within society.

Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin almost certainly had all this in mind when they wrote that we had an unalienable right to pursue happiness. Admittedly, Jefferson called himself an epicurean. Jefferson, however, was not the Declaration’s sole author. And epicureans recognized the connection between pleasure, happiness, and virtue too. Epicurus acknowledged that “the virtues have grown into one with a pleasant life, and a pleasant life is inseparable from them.” This view of happiness diverges from Hobbesian moral relativism and its heirs.

The Declaration’s statement also modifies John Locke’s formulation that our inalienable rights were to life, liberty, and property (or estate as he originally termed it). Virginia’s June 1776 Declaration of Rights added the pursuit of happiness to life, liberty, and property. It arguably makes property a means to pursuing happiness. The Declaration removed property altogether. Removing property implicitly makes a claim about what it means to be human. Property is certainly important, but we are not primarily acquisitive creatures. We are not made to be consumers. We use and hold our property as a means to an end. Property is good but it is not the Good. Our desire for good things, like property, leads us to desire the good life, virtue, and happiness. Moral growth requires examining and rightly ordering our desires. Critics then and now claimed that happiness is independent of virtue or that “good” is just a fancy word we use to cover up our desires. They were wrong millennia ago. They were wrong 250 years ago. And they are wrong today.

“‘Pursuit of happiness’ meant virtue, not pleasure, to the Founders” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.