Alex Thorn

09.29.04

PHIL 115W-26

The Evolution of the Right to Pursue Happiness

The basis of the right to pursue happiness is the notion that every human deserves the right to attempt to achieve his or her own destiny. The writers of the Declaration of Independence held that such a right was “unalienable” – along with the rights to life and liberty – because they believed it to be “endowed by their Creator” (Declaration). Because the founding fathers considered the ability to pursue happiness a God given right, then it would be the case that every human is born with the right. Thus, the right to pursue happiness is not unalienable, as the Declaration suggests, but simply a right which the founding fathers deemed important enough to protect. The founding fathers so heavily promoted the right to pursue happiness as a political move reactive to the oppressive British occupation. Because Great Britain had infringed on the Americans’ rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the authors of the Declaration found the British government oppressive. Thus, it was easy for the founding fathers to rally the troops, so to say, under the banner of “escaping British oppression.” The political nature of the right to pursue happiness is visible in the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation and the Bill of Rights.

Of the three unalienable rights discussed in the Declaration, the right to pursue happiness is the one with the most political meaning: it is the vaguest, and it is in that vagueness that rests the notion constant governmental improvement. The assurance that citizens will have the right to live is a simple one, easily granted by a government: All a government must do is tell its citizens, “Hey, we will let you live.” Likewise, it is not difficult to give freedoms to citizens – as proved by the vast amount of freedom granted to the people under the Articles of Confederation. What is difficult for a government to do is grant freedoms to the citizens and still maintain a federal sovereignty – to allow the people to pursue their own happiness, by their own means, and under their own terms without creating anarchy. The failure of the Articles of Confederation is a perfect example of just how difficult it is for a government to grant the “unalienable” – and therefore difficult to regulate – right to pursue happiness. Essentially, the authors of the Declaration envisioned a nation of self determination, “a land of opportunity,” where the individual – not the federal government – came first. A land where one cannot pursue happiness is, therefore, one where the government comes first, a notion which the founding fathers readily despised.

Before continuing, a few things must be clarified. By granting the right to pursue happiness, a government grants the right to opportunity. Essentially, the right to pursue happiness can be interpreted as the ability to set and achieve your own goals. In the United States, this has allowed people to practice their own religions, own property, seek the best education possible, and, in effect, operate and trade in a free market. However, the reason this is so difficult for a government to guarantee is because the phrase “unalienable right to pursue happiness” is, therefore, fairly contradictory. Suggesting that such a right is “unalienable” makes it very difficult for the government to then regulate it. If a government were to regulate a right that it had earlier deemed “unalienable,” would that not constitute an alienation of that right, at least on some level?

Another valuable distinction that must be made is between the “government” and the “people.” A common misperception is that the two are one in the same, or that they were one in the same. However, the Constitution originally created a government that was highly undemocratic. For example, Article I of the Constitution creates an upper house of Congress, the Senate, whose members are not subject to direct elections. Originally, the state legislatures appointed their two Senators. This was later repealed by the 17^th Amendment. Similarly, the President of the United States was not subject to a direct election, but rather was appointed by the Electoral College. A notable example of how undemocratic that system is may be found in the 2000 presidential election, when Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election. In fact, the only members of the federal government who were actually elected directly by the people were the members of the House of Representatives. Thus, it would be erroneous to consider the United States federal government, at least at its inception, to be entirely a “government by the people.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, goes to great length to describe the occasions on which Great Britain violated the colonists’ rights to pursue happiness.

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world… [Great Britain] has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness [its] invasions on the rights of the people… for cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world… for imposing Taxes on us without our Consent… for depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury… (Declaration of Independence)

Because Jefferson recounts specific incidences that deeply offended the colonists (and there are many more listed in the document), it’s easy for him to argue for a revolution under the pretense that each human should have the right to pursue happiness. The right to pursue happiness he described was one not to be taken away, withheld, or revoked by the federal government. This set the stage for the creation of the Articles of Confederation, which created an extremely limited government and allowed anarchy. For example, there was no federal dollar, so states made money as they saw fit. This caused incredible inflation and essentially made dealing in currency a useless endeavor. The federal government was not given the power to raise money; it simply spent, then submitted a budget to the states and asked for money in return, though it had no power to make the states pay up, so they often did not. Insofar as “anarchy” means the “lack of government,” the Articles of Confederation created just that. Article III of the document states that the individual States shall “enter into a firm league of friendship,” which sounds quite like the modern day United Nations. In contrast to the weakness of the central government, the states were free to raise revenue in manners that could be often heavy-handed. This is what led to the Shays Rebellion. Shays Rebellion amounted to mobs of farmers and workers who, angry with the horrible economic state of the nation, took matters into their own hands in August of 1786 and barred access to the courts of several towns such as Pittsfield and Northampton. The importance of Shays Rebellion was not so much the acts of rebellion themselves but how it pointed out the weakness of the Articles of Confederation for governing the United States. In order to prevent such anarchy in the future and to strengthen the central government, the Philadelphia Convention convened to draft the Constitution in the spring of 1787, just a short time after the end of Shays Rebellion. (Fiorina, 37)

The reason the Articles of Confederation were this way was because the founding fathers overreacted to the British tyranny and decentralized power too much, weighing individual freedoms much too heavily. Ultimately, because they did not grant the federal government enough power, the Articles had to be re-written. The extreme decentralization and promotion of individual liberties were direct effects of the desire to promote and protect the right to pursue happiness. However, the government took the right to pursue happiness too far, creating a state of anarchy in which people were free to pursue whatever happiness they pleased, even if it interfered with the happiness of others. Basically, chaos ensued. Because of the lack of federal government, states were able to issue their own money, which caused inflation to run rampant (Fiorina, 37). Thus, James Madison and other leaders of the time joined in congress to draft a new document, the Constitution, which would change the pursuit of happiness from an unalienable right that could not be at all infringed upon by the government, to a more restricted form of freedom. The articles of the Constitution, therefore, describe a much more centralized government that actually gives the government the ability to limit certain freedoms.

The Constitution represents a step back from the anarchy created by the Articles of Confederation. The first article of the Constitution allots powers to Congress, such as the ability to regulate commerce (reaction to the inflation and other economic troubles under the Articles of Confederation) and declare war. Most importantly, the first article of the constitution gives Congress the right to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.” (Constitution, Article 1, §8, Clause 18) It is this clause which represents a vast departure from the original idea of the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right. Under the constitution, the government had the right to make laws, ones that limit the citizens’ freedoms, for example, if they proved “necessary and proper” to maintain civil order. In addition, Congress is granted the ability to suspend the writ of habeas corpus “when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” (Constitution, Article 1, §9, Clause 2) It should be reiterated that Congress was originally quite undemocratic, as the Senators were appointed, not elected. In 1992, the Supreme Court recognized the fact that “the writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.” (Brown v. Vazquez, 1166) Thus, the first article of the constitution actually grants the federal government the right to withhold individual rights, such as that to pursue happiness, when the time requires. If the right to pursue happiness were such an unalienable right in the eyes of the founding fathers, they would not have given the federal government the ability to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. This represents a considerable departure from the original “unalienable” right to pursue happiness as described by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.

The first eight amendments to the Constitution serve to protect civil liberties and rights from the federal government. In that sense, the Bill of Rights exhibits the need to restore some civil liberties and freedoms after drafting such a federally weighted Constitution. Each amendment of the Bill of Rights was written to protect the ability of the citizens to pursue happiness. For example, in the first amendment, citizens are guaranteed, among other important things, the freedom of religion. Intrinsic in that right is the ability to seek out and practice the religion of their choice, and the rights to life and liberty support that right. However, what the right to pursue happiness adds is the right of a citizen to practice said religion without discrimination from others. It is easy for the government to tell the citizens that they can choose whatever religion they please. It is much more meaningful, however, for the government to allow its citizens to choose their own religions and then protect them from discrimination or prejudice. The Bill of Rights represents an attempt to restore the notion of the right to pursue happiness in the face of the much more centralized, less free government created by the Constitution. Though it was less democratic, the added strength of the federal government offered protection of the rights it did grant.

Thomas Jefferson’s “right to pursue happiness” was originally a response to the tyranny of the British government. He knew that if he said that there was this “unalienable” right that all people possess and can never have revoked, but that Great Britain had done so, it would be easy to state the case for revolution. If the right to pursue happiness was really “unalienable” in the eyes of the founding fathers, they would not have drafted the Constitution and given the federal government the ability to suspend Habeas Corpus or regulate individual freedoms. Some would argue that the existence of the Bill of Rights shows that the founding fathers still viewed the right to pursue happiness as an unalienable right. However, there is a reason that the basic individual freedoms that we enjoy today were not written directly into the constitution. In fact, the Bill of Rights was written years after the Constitution and only because of pressure from some states who demanded that individual freedoms be protected, at least in some form. (Fiorina, 42) Thus, Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence may have considered the right to pursue happiness an unalienable one at the time of the document’s creation, but that belief turned out to be much shallower. The ten years under the Articles of Confederation (between 1777 when it was drafted and 1787 when the Constitution was approved), which epitomized the full application of the right to pursue happiness, as well as its failure, represent a time of anarchy and shows just how faulty complete freedom can be. And, even though the Constitution was written in response to the anarchy under the Articles of Confederation, if the right to pursue happiness were truly unalienable, then no brush with anarchy would be intimidating enough to justify removing it.

Works Cited

Brown v. Vasquez, 952 F.2d 1164 (9th Cir. 1992)

Fiorina, Morris and Peterson, Paul. The New American Democracy. 3^rd Alt. Ed. New York: Longman, 2003.

United States. Jefferson, Thomas and signers. Declaration of Independence. July 4, 1776.

United States. Constitution of the United States of America. 1787.