Pursuit of Happiness
Happiness is human flourishing—a life lived well through reason and virtue; the pursuit of happiness is the natural right to seek it.
The Declaration of Independence does not proclaim an unalienable natural right to happiness. It proclaims an unalienable natural right to pursue it.
The distinction matters.
No government can make a human being happy. No law can guarantee that a person will choose wisely, cultivate good friendships, govern his passions, develop his talents, or live well. Those things depend substantially upon how a person chooses to live.
Government can protect the liberty within which human beings pursue happiness. It cannot supply happiness itself.
Happiness in the Declaration
The Declaration of Independence identifies “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” among the unalienable rights with which human beings are endowed. It then states that governments are instituted “to secure these rights.” Later, the Declaration speaks again of “Safety and Happiness” as ends toward which a new government should be organized.
Happiness therefore appears twice in the Declaration.
But the Declaration does not explain what happiness is. To understand the larger moral tradition within which happiness was discussed, it is useful to turn to one of the great treatments of the subject: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
What Is Happiness?
Aristotle begins with a simple observation: human actions and choices aim at goods. Some goods are pursued for the sake of other, higher goods. We choose to set an alarm not merely to hear the alarm, but in order to wake up on time. We wake up on time because we want to reach work, school, or the airport. We work because we want income, achievement, useful activity, or other goods. We seek those goods, in turn, for still higher purposes.
This leads Aristotle to the ultimate question: Is there some highest good that we desire not merely as a means to something else, but ultimately for its own sake? His answer is: Yes. Eudaimonia, which is conventionally translated as happiness, but also rendered as flourishing or living well.
Happiness is not simply one more desirable thing alongside money, pleasure, honor, friendship, or health. It is the larger good of a human life lived well.
Aristotle describes the human good as an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, sustained through a complete life. One good action does not make a good life. As he famously observes, one swallow does not make a summer.
Happiness Is More Than Feeling Good
This conception differs sharply from identifying happiness with a passing feeling. Pleasure can accompany happiness. Aristotle does not teach that pleasure is bad. But pleasure by itself cannot tell us whether we are living well.
Some pleasurable choices can damage us. Some excellent choices are difficult, painful, or demanding.
A courageous act may be frightening. Keeping a promise may be inconvenient. Moderating an appetite may require denying oneself something immediately pleasant. Caring for a child, helping a friend, studying something difficult, or standing against injustice may involve hardship.
The question is therefore not simply: Does this make me feel good right now? The deeper question is: Is this choice part of living well as a human being?
Virtue and Happiness
This connects the Pursuit of Happiness directly to the Key Idea Virtue.
Virtues are excellences by which human beings think, choose, and act well. Courage helps us govern fear. Moderation helps reason govern appetite. Justice directs us toward what is rightfully due to others. Prudence helps us deliberate well about what should be done.
Possessing virtue merely as an abstract idea is not enough. Aristotle emphasizes activity: the virtuous person must actually act virtuously. And virtue becomes a way of life through repeated choices.
A single courageous action does not by itself make a courageous life. A single just action does not make a just person. Human character develops through habits, and happiness therefore concerns the shape of a life taken as a whole.
Aristotle does not claim that virtue makes human beings invulnerable to circumstance. Health, friendship, material necessities, and other external goods matter. Severe misfortune can diminish a life profoundly. But external goods by themselves cannot constitute happiness either. A person may possess wealth, pleasure, status, and comfort while living badly.
Washington on Virtue and Happiness
George Washington expressed a closely related principle in his First Inaugural Address.
He declared that there exists in the “economy and course of nature” an “indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.” He immediately connected virtue with duty, morality, public prosperity, and what he called the “eternal rules of order and right.”
Washington was speaking particularly about the moral character of public life and the new American republic. But his formulation rests upon a larger premise important to Waypoints: happiness and virtue are intrinsically related to one another.
How human beings choose to live affects whether they flourish.
Freedom therefore presents a challenge as well as an opportunity. Liberty gives us room to choose. It does not guarantee that we will choose well.
A Right to Pursue, Not a Right to Receive
The Declaration’s formulation is especially important here. Human beings possess a natural right to pursue happiness.
That means each person must be substantially free to direct his own life: to exercise his faculties, form relationships, choose an occupation, worship according to conscience, acquire property, learn, work, deliberate, and make the countless choices through which a human life takes shape.
But the right belongs to the pursuer.
Another person cannot live virtuously for you. Government cannot exercise courage, moderation, justice, or prudence on your behalf. It cannot manufacture friendship, wisdom, character, or a meaningful life and deliver them as benefits.
This connects the Pursuit of Happiness to Liberty, Responsibility, Natural Rights, Property, Virtue, and the Purpose of Government. Government properly protects the liberty to pursue happiness. The responsibility for pursuing it belongs to the individual.
Why the Pursuit of Happiness Matters
The pursuit of happiness is more demanding than the pursuit of whatever happens to please us at a particular moment. If happiness means human flourishing—living and acting well—then pursuing happiness requires learning what is genuinely good for human beings and ordering our choices accordingly. The pursuit of happiness is work.
Liberty and virtue belong together. Liberty gives human beings the freedom to direct their own lives. Virtue helps them direct those lives well.
The natural right to pursue happiness protects our freedom to seek the good life. It does not guarantee that we will find it. That depends, in large measure, upon how we choose to live.
