Supplement: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
As any casual romp about the Internet will confirm, there is a great deal of confusion over why Thomas Jefferson altered John Locke’s already famous formula—Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property—when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Yes, Jefferson’s decision to replace Locke’s “pursuit of property” with “pursuit of happiness” was shaped by the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason. According to Article I of the Virginia Declaration:
All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
We see here how tightly bound together Mason, the delegates to the Virginia Convention, and Thomas Jefferson felt property—real estate—and happiness were indeed.
And, yet, the attribution is entirely misplaced. It belongs not to Mason, or Jefferson, or even to Locke. It belongs almost in its entirety to Aristotle. For it was Aristotle who, in roughly 350 BCE, first coherently laid out why and how happiness might be the chief end and goal of human thought and action. He did so in Book One of his Nicomachean Ethics.
Many of the delegates in Philadelphia in 1776—and , again, in 1787—would have been able to recite Aristotle’s argument by heart, in the original. So it is well that we bear Aristotle’s argument in mind when we reflect upon its meaning. The first question that naturally comes to mind is, why not happiness? What else could possibly be more basic?
And, of course, the obvious answer is property, things. Here is Aristotle’s argument. The highest good is an “end which we want for its own sake, and for the sake of which we want all the other ends—if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for this will involve an infinite progression, so that our aim will be pointless and ineffectual).” To Aristotle, as for the delegates in Philadelphia, it was “clear that this must be the good, that is, the supreme good.”
And, what is that good? “‘It is happiness,’ say both ordinary and cultured people; and they identify happiness with living well or doing well.” But, as Aristotle points out, it is precisely here that our troubles begin. For “when it comes to saying in what happiness consists, opinions differ, and the account given by the generality of mankind is not at all like that of the wise.” Most people, observed Aristotle, took happiness to be “something obvious and familiar, like pleasure or money or eminence.” Moreover, most people are liable to change their views depending on their circumstances. “When they fall ill they say that it is health, and when they are hard up that it is money.” Or, “conscious of their own ignorance, they are impressed by anyone who pontificates and says something that is over their heads.”
At this point, Aristotle would appear to be heading in the same direction as his mentor, Plato, who held that the highest good did not reside in things at all, but could be obtained only through contemplation. But, this, too, Aristotle rejected. True happiness is no more obtained in contemplation than true community could be obtained in complete solitude. For, argued Aristotle, “even if the good of the community coincides with that of the individual, it is clearly a greater and more perfect thing to achieve and preserve that of a community; for while it is desirable to secure what is good in the case of an individual, to do so in the case of a people or a state is something finer and more sublime.” If, therefore, happiness is the highest good, it is not obtained in private contemplation, but in public action.
But, then, Aristotle catches himself. Would it not be possible for a citizen to be happy but momentarily, but, over the duration of his life otherwise miserable? Therefore, Aristotle concludes:
The good for man is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, or if there are more kinds of virtue than one, in accordance with the best and most perfect kind. There is a further qualification: in a complete lifetime. One swallow does not make a summer; neither does one day. Similarly neither can one day, or a brief space of time, make a man blessed and happy.
Happiness, then, extends across a lifetime and consists, not as Plato had argued, in contemplating the realm of pure ideas, but in exercising virtue publicly and for the benefit of the public. Still, Plato was not completely mistaken. It is not the things around us that make for our happiness. Rather, it is the virtue of the good individual who then sees in these things means for achieving the highest good in the republic. For, as Aristotle points out, it is possible for individuals to experience happiness entirely in their heads without ever acting one way or another; without, as he puts it, “effecting any good result (e.g., if he is asleep or quiescent in some other way, but not for the activity).” But the virtuous person “will necessarily act, and act well.” Thus, Aristotle likens to person possessed by good intentions, but no public action, to the Olympian who merely dreams of running a race.
Just as at the Olympic Games it is not the best-looking or the strongest men present that are crowned with wreaths, but the competitors (because it is from them that the winners come), so it is those who act that rightly win the honours and rewards in life.
The difference between the one and the other, between a life of merely contemplating the good and the life that brings about the good publicly, is that the former is lacking in true virtue and, therefore, in true happiness.
And, yet, Aristotle was not finished. For, he notes, it would still be possible for individuals to be virtuous, not only privately, in their heads, but publicly for the sake of the community, and still live miserable lives. “It seems clear,” therefore, “that happiness needs the addition of external goods, as we have said; for it is difficult if not impossible to do fine deeds without any resources.” And there is more.
Many can only be done as it were by instruments—by the help of friends, or wealth, or political influence. There are also certain advantages, such as good ancestry or good children or personal beauty, the lack of which mars our felicity; for a man is scarcely happy if he is very ugly to look at, or of low birth, or solitary and childless; and presumably even less so if he has children or friends who are quite worthless, or if he had good ones who are now dead. So, as we said, happiness seems to require this sort of prosperity too; which is why some identify it with good fortune, although others identify it with virtue.
And with this we near the wisdom that George Mason found in John Locke’s formula and also the reason why Thomas Jefferson felt compelled to replace Locke’s “pursuit of property” with Mason’s “pursuit of happiness.” Happiness is not something flimsy, a mere idea or fleeting virtue. It depends upon real good fortune and material goods. But it is not those goods. Nor is it something that can be had privately, individually, or in my own household. For, as Aristotle reminded his students “on this view happiness will be something widely shared; for it can attach, through some form of study or application, to anyone who is not handicapped by some incapacity for goodness.”
We conclude, then, that the happy man will have the required quality, and in fact will be happy throughout his life; because he will spend all his time, or the most time of any man, in virtuous conduct and contemplation. And he will bear his fortunes in the finest spirit and with perfect sureness of touch, as being “good in very truth’” and “foursquare without reproach.”
Property and happiness were related for the Founding Fathers not because property was the goal or aim of human life; but, rather, because they understood that only those who possessed their own property, those who did not have to labor in another person’s household (and for this reason only those who were truly independent); only such individuals could be truly happy.