TGIF: On the Pursuit of Happiness

The most remarkable phrase in the Declaration of Independence, whose anniversary we just celebrated, is the pursuit of happiness. Looking back 248 years, that phrase may strike the modern ear as strange for a political document. But it apparently did not seem that way to Americans in 1776. The second paragraph told the world:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The term among these indicates that Thomas Jefferson and the Second Continental Congress did not think that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were our only unalienable rights. But the pursuit of happiness made the brief enumeration, which speaks volumes.

The first thing to note is that Jefferson did not write that we had a right to happiness, but only the right to pursue it. Legal scholar and historian Carli N. Conklin of the University of Missouri School of Law states in "The Origin of the Pursuit of Happiness":

[T]he pursuit of happiness is not a legal guarantee that one will obtain happiness, even when happiness is defined within its eighteenth-century context. It is instead, an articulation of the idea that as humans we were created to live, at liberty, with the unalienable right to engage in the pursuit.

Through historical investigation, Conklin shows that contrary to common belief, the phrase was no "glittering generality" (in Carl Becker's phrase) back them but rather was a term of substance.

I trust no one will take seriously that the omission of property from the list of examples means that Jefferson et al. thought property unimportant. Of course, it did not mean that. We know that the people behind the Declaration understood the deep importance of private property to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A possible reason for not listing it is that property was often used differently from the way we use it today. While we say, "That's my property," an 18th-century person might say, "I have a property in that," although today's usage was hardly unknown back then. James Madison, who was not a member of the Continental Congress but who had a lot of say about property, used the word both ways. However, here are examples of what he called "the larger and juster meaning" of the word:

[A] man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. [Emphasis added.]

He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.

He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.

He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them. [Emphasis added.]

In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.

It's widely known that Jefferson and other founders were deeply influenced by John Locke, the 17th-century philosopher who did so much intellectually to usher in the age of liberalism. Locke, who himself was inspired by the ancient Greek philosophers' focus on happiness, or eudaimonia, invoked the pursuit of happiness. Already, the term had a long and esteemed pedigree.  (Jefferson was also influenced directly by the Greeks. He wrote in a letter, "I too am an Epicurean.") Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690; Book II, chapter XXI, section 52) says this: 

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. The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action, and from a necessary compliance with our desire, set upon any particular, and then appearing preferable good, till we have duly examined, whether it has a tendency to, or be inconsistent with our real happiness: and therefore till we are as much informed upon this inquiry, as the weight of the matter, and the nature of the case demands; we are, by the necessity of preferring and pursuing true happiness as our greatest good, obliged to suspend the satisfaction of our desires in particular cases.

But a puzzle arises. In his influential Two Treatises of Government, Locke referred to "life, liberty, and estate," that is, property, and not the pursuit of happiness. Why Jefferson, without a challenge, switched to "the pursuit of happiness" has been much discussed by scholars over the years. I am certainly not qualified to render a verdict. On why Jefferson made the switch, Carli Conklin writes,

The most persistent explanation offered is that Jefferson was
uncomfortable enough with slavery to want to avoid perpetuating a
property ownership in slaves by including an unalienable right to property in the Declaration.

If that is so, we might wonder if Jefferson's immortal phrase all men are created equal was his way of assuring the future demise of slavery. He had included a condemnation of slavery in the Declaration but had to remove it to make the Declaration acceptable to the Southern colonies. We also can see from his Notes on the State of Virginia that he knew slavery was wrong: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever."

Finally, we surely can chalk up a point for Ayn Rand, the novelist/philosopher who made the rational pursuit of happiness—self-interest—the foundation of her Objectivist ethics and politics. She has been a lone voice in this endeavor. People who find the free market repugnant—and most who do not—never tire of equating self-interest with "selfishness," that ugly-sounding word that Rand herself used in a book title just for its shock value. The equation, however, is invidious. It suggests that other people necessarily are impediments to one's happiness and thus one should sacrifice one's happiness at least to some extent. But why would anyone believe that "selfishness"—making the most of one's life by holding it as one's ultimate value—entails the disvaluing of other people? It's crazy on its face. Rand, like the ancient Greeks, understood that he who cares about only himself demonstrates that he doesn't care enough.

A belated Happy Fourth of July!

TGIF: Why Liberty Matters

Why does liberty matter? It’s a fair question because, after all, not everyone thinks it matters very much, perhaps beyond some very basic point. If that’s an overstatement, we can safely say that for many people on the left and right, liberty is a lower priority than it is for libertarians and classical liberals. Most pundits and politicians, even most anti-war types, have plans for how to spend your money.

What can we libertarians say? We have lots to say. It's a multifront operation. Some libertarians press the case in terms of moral consequentialism, either utilitarian or egoist. Others take a duty-oriented, or deontological, route, stressing a rule-boundedness that may look like a rights theory. (Rule-consequentialism, as opposed to act-consequentialism, ends up looking like this.)

A third approach is eudaimonia, or virtue ethics, which has been inherited from the ancient Greeks, for example in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. In this approach, consequences are not irrelevant -- in fact, they are baked into the conception of features (virtues) that tend toward the perfection of the individual person as a rational social being. In brief, respecting other people as ends in themselves is integral to respecting oneself. I like this approach.

The problem with persuading others about all this is that proof is difficult. It's not like mathematics or physics. Aristotle wrote that the quality of proof in one area of knowledge, say, mathematics, is not to be expected in other areas, say, ethics. You have to play the hand that reality has dealt.

Modern libertarians have been debating among themselves the proper foundation of the freedom philosophy for decades. I can recall a libertarian scholars conference nearly 50 years ago when Murray Rothbard and historian friends expressed frustration over yet another panel of philosophers arguing the fine details of their respective approaches. The philosophical debate is important, but it's easy to get lost in the weeds. Does it matter to the public? Most nonlibertarians are not philosophers or interested in philosophy.

Leaving all that aside (and to people more qualified than I am), what can libertarians say to regular people? The general public often takes positions and attitudes based on cultural and media signals, but that doesn't mean we should not try to win regular people over directly, say, through the internet. Lots of opinion-makers have an incentive to ignore us.

To make our case, I want to start by saying that we know one thing clearly: each individual's life is important to him or her. People care about themselves. Each cares about other people too, but those others are important to the one doing the caring. Far from ruling out regard for others, properly conceived self-interest requires regard for others. It's self-evident. We're social beings. We flourish partly through all sorts of instrumental and constitutive relationships with others.

Each person generally wants life to be long and satisfying. We can call that flourishing. Life is a project, and it consists of many sub-projects. We are not ghosts. Projects require material things: a place to live and work, nourishment, tools, products, and so on. In a word, possessions. If people are to flourish they need to know that their possessions are secure. They need rights, including property rights, to define zones in which they can act free of compulsion. Our nature requires it, so they are natural rights.

We can sum all this up with the term self-ownership, to which no coherent alternative exists. The American abolitionists called slave masters "manstealers." How apt. In 1864 Lincoln wrote in a letter that "if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." (I know about Lincoln's faults.) Here's the logical corollary to that truth: if self-ownership is not right, nothing is right. That's the libertarian philosophy in concentrated form.

Does knowing this solve all social problems? Of course not. Exactly when conduct begins to become aggression can't always be decided in an armchair. Boundaries can be fuzzy; social conventions will emerge. Life is about grappling with problems. (Sowell says there are no solutions, only trade-offs.) Context matters. So peaceful dispute-resolution will always be necessary, preferably not provided by a coercive government. That doesn't keep self-ownership from being a strong and reasonable guide to grappling with interpersonal problems. On the contrary, it justifies a presumption of liberty.

Critics will ask about the blameless who have little, who wonder where their next meal will come from, and how they will get education or medical attention. Fair question, and we have answers. The primary one is that free people in a free market produce great abundance and variety, which they are eager to sell or rent to others. (Even the hampered market has done this to a great extent for a couple of hundred years.) The West's move toward markets brought the first mass production, which did not always please the aristocracy.

Moreover, the governmental causes of the worst times in history -- from war to domestic mass murder to depression -- can be readily demonstrated. They were not the product of freedom, which common sense tells you is the right way for rational social beings to live.

While these times seem unfriendly to the freedom philosophy, it's possible that this philosophy will eventually delight the people fed up with the woke progressives, national conservatives, and neoconservatives. Maybe time is on freedom's side.

Privacy as a Property Right

In 1993 I wrote an article at the Cato Institute that may be relevant to the current controversy over abortion and the Supreme Court: "Dissolving the Inkblot: Privacy as a Property Right."

TGIF: On Property and Aggression

Some critics on the left enjoy faulting libertarians for believing that property is a bulwark against aggression. To the libertarian argument that violations of property — including trespasses on land — constitute aggression, these critics respond that property ownership itself is aggression because it limits the freedom of others. Of course, property by nature limits the non-owners’ freedom of action, but not their rights, a distinction lost of these critics. In the libertarian, or radical-liberal, view, if I own a parcel of land, I may rightfully stop others from using it, even from simply walking across it. (Justice requires that the method I use be proportional to the severity of the rights violation. I can’t justly shoot an unthreatening person who merely steps on my land.) Our critics call that aggression. Thus they conclude that libertarians don’t oppose all aggression. Those who make this argument seek to deprive libertarians of the high moral ground by showing that they too favor (certain kinds of) aggression.

I think the fundamental flaw in the argument is that it drops the context in which moral and political philosophy is pursued....

Read TGIF at The Libertarian Institute.

TGIF (The Goal Is Freedom) appears on Fridays. Sheldon Richman, author of America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited, keeps the blog Free Association and is executive editor of The Libertarian Institute. He is also a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. Become a Free Association patron today!

Privacy as Property Right

In 1993, while working at the Cato Institute, I published an article in the institute's Policy Report that is relevant to discussions occasioned by the death of Antonin Scalia. "Dissolving the Inkblot: Privacy as Property Right" attempts to show that the conservative and progressive constitutional approaches to the right of privacy are both flawed and proposes an alternative approach rooted in the right to property, beginning with self-ownership.

Enjoy!

Self-Ownership and the Right to Property

"Is Property Theft?" is an updated version of Less Antman's great article on property. I urge everyone to read it. Well, what are you waiting for?