What did Jefferson mean by "Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness"?

[Muad_Dib]

A special 4’th of July Great Debate.

Everyone has heard the famous lines:

We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all men are created equal.
That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable right.
Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What did he mean about those words? Especially the last, happiness. Life and liberty seem pretty obvious, but what is a right to happiness?

[Edlyn]

Just a nitpick. A right to the pursuit of happiness, not to happiness.

You brought up a good question, Muad’Dib and it’s something many do not have a full understanding of.

John Locke’s original formulation was life, liberty and property. These are the natural rights which government exists to protect and was foremost in the minds of the Founding Fathers. These are the foundation of freedom. If government has arbitrary rights to take your life, liberty or property, that society will inevitably deteriorate into tyranny. Jefferson’s “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” expands upon Locke in one important way: it recognizes that property ownership is a means to an end. Having property means that one has the ability to support one’s self, develop God (or nature) given talents, develop your spiritual life and character through choice of beliefs and values, control of the sweat from your labor to keep, trade, or give away to another whether it is intellectual property or material goods. Property is not just material objects, but that which belongs to you, that which you own. Property rights allow you the resources to pursue that happiness.

By the way, Jefferson did originally write property in the first draft.

[Edlyn]

Just a nitpick. A right to the pursuit of happiness, not to happiness.

You brought up a good question, Muad’Dib and it’s something many do not have a full understanding of.

John Locke’s original formulation was life, liberty and property. These are the natural rights which government exists to protect and was foremost in the minds of the Founding Fathers. These are the foundation of freedom. If government has arbitrary rights to take your life, liberty or property, that society will inevitably deteriorate into tyranny. Jefferson’s “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” expands upon Locke in one important way: it recognizes that property ownership is a means to an end. Having property means that one has the ability to support one’s self, develop God (or nature) given talents, develop your spiritual life and character through choice of beliefs and values, control of the sweat from your labor to keep, trade, or give away to another whether it is intellectual property or material goods. Property is not just material objects, but that which belongs to you, that which you own. Property rights allow you the resources to pursue that happiness.

By the way, Jefferson did originally write property in the first draft.

[rjung]

“You have the right to pursuit happiness. You don’t have the right to actually be happy.”
–Scott Adams, Dilbert

[Grey]

I think it goes back to Aristotle’s idea of happiness, not the modern happiness=pleasure.

From Ethics
“He is happy who lives in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete life.”

The point being that this pursuit of happiness would be the highest good that a man could achieve. The ability to achieve the necessary external goods and internal virtue required the freeing of the human condition from tyrants and so underpins the whole ideal of the constitution.

[Captain_Amazing]

Well, here’s Locke’s definition of happiness, from his Essay Concering Human Understanding

Happiness, then, in its full extent, is the utmost pleasure we are capable of, and misery the utmost pain; and the lowest degree of what can be called happiness is so much ease from all pain, and so much present pleasure, as without which any one cannot be content. Now, because pleasure and pain are produced in us by the operation of certain objects, either on our minds or our bodies, and in different degrees; therefore, what has an aptness to produce pleasure in us is that we call good, and what is apt to produce pain in us we call evil; for no other reason but for its aptness to produce pleasure and pain in us, wherein consists our happiness and misery. Further, though what is apt to produce any degree of pleasure be in itself good; and what is apt to produce any degree of pain be evil; yet it often happens that we do not call it so when it comes in competition with a greater of its sort; because, when they come in competition, the degrees also of pleasure and pain have justly a preference. So that if we will rightly estimate what we call good and evil, we shall find it lies much in comparison: for the cause of every less degree of pain, as well as every greater degree of pleasure, has the nature of good, and vice versa.

[Captain_Amazing]

Then you get this, from Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights”, written by John Mason, which influenced Jefferson:

That 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.

[Johanna]

Happiness is finding a pencil
Pizza with sausage
Telling the time

Happiness is learning to whistle
Tying your shoe
For the very first time.

Happiness is playing the drum
In your own school band.
And happiness is walking hand in hand.

Happiness is two kinds of ice cream…
Knowing a secret…
Climbing a tree.

Happiness is five dif’rent crayons…
Catching a firefly…
Setting him free.

Happiness is being alone ev’ry now and then.
And happiness is coming home again.

Happiness is morning and evening,
Daytime and nighttime too.
For happiness is anyone and anything at all
That’s loved by you.

Happiness is having a sister
Sharing a sandwich
Getting along-

Happiness is singing together when day is through.
And happiness is those who sing with you.
Happiness is morning and evening,
Daytime and nighttime, too,

For happiness is anyone and anything at all
That’s loved by you.

You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.

[Milum]

By virtue of the make up of man, Jeffersonian “happiness” must always be pursued. The experiencing organism has no steady-state. Pleasure leads to pain and then back to pleasure and then back to pain. Strife is continual. This is wonderful. High life forms could not persist through time were it not this way.

(This is not some mystic mumbo jumbo this is the human condition. But only those with ears that think know this to be trure.)
_________________ () ________________

[Annie-Xmas]

From the Sopranos:

Where’s my happiness? Doesn’t the Constitution say I have a right to happiness?

That’s the pursuit of happiness.

Always a fucking loophole.