but he also values it for the other good things that equality facilitates. Ethical goods are subject to the same dualism (justice is a good-in-itself, but it also serves many other purposes).
What the men and women of the eighteenth century took for granted—and I will take for granted in this book—is that the mind must conceive a stopping point to the chain of questions about “What other ends does it serve?”: an end at which there is no answer possible, an end that is reached when one is talking about the good-that-one-seeks-as-an-end-in-itself-and-for-no-other-reason. At this stage of the discussion, there is no need for us to try to decide what this ultimate good-in-itself consists of. We need only to agree that the concept of such a self-sufficient end-in-itself exists. To be discussed, it needs a label. That label is happiness.
Happiness and Higher Goals
The use of happiness in this, its ancient and honored meaning, nonetheless continues to sound strange to contemporary ears. “Happiness” has become identified with self-absorption, the goal you seek if you are a young urban professional who doesn’t give a damn about anything except your own pleasure. When “happiness” is proposed as the proper goal of life, the nearly reflexive response is that a major problem with contemporary America is that too many people are
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preoccupied with their own happiness and that too few understand that life has higher and more worthy purposes.
The most obvious response to this is semantic: You can have no higher aspiration than happiness. By definition (the traditional one), happiness is the only thing that is self-sufficiently good in itself and does not facilitate or lead to any other better thing. A “higher” goal would be another good. That other good, being good as you define good, would contribute to your happiness. (If you say that perhaps not—that it is possible for something to be good that nonetheless does not contribute to your happiness—then you find yourself entangled in self-contradictions. Somewhere along the line, you are shifting the definition either of “good” or of “happiness.”)
But such semantic responses are not sufficient, for they seem to imply that a Mother Teresa’s understanding of the highest good cannot be distinguished from an understanding of the highest good as a new BMW. Let me add therefore another common understanding from the eighteenth-century tradition. It was taken for granted that any thoughtful person thinks about what “the good” means, and especially about what the highest good means. It was also taken for granted that thoughtful people strive to live their lives (albeit with the frailties and inconstancies of humans) according to that understanding. The pursuit of happiness is not just something that human beings “do,” it is the duty of a human being functioning as a human being, on a par with the duty to preserve one’s integrity.
Let me take this thought further. To imagine a human being not pursuing happiness is a kind of contradiction in terms. To be fully human is to seek the best ends one knows, and to be fully human is also to apply one’s human intelligence as best one can to the question, What is the good? I will be returning to this densely packed thought in the next chapter, but as starting points: Happiness is something that a Mother Teresa is striving to achieve. And anyone whose highest good really is a new BMW is not thinking in recognizably human ways. (If that seems harsh, note the italics.) For those who put their signatures to the Declaration, a society in which people were able to pursue happiness was no more and no less than a society in which people were able to go about the business of being human beings as wisely and
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fully as they could. The job of government was to enable them to do so.6 People can have no higher calling, nor can governments.
My assertion, and the linchpin of this book, is that what was true then is true now. The longer one thinks about why one is in favor of or opposed to any particular measure to help people, the more one is driven to employ that most un-twentieth-century concept, happiness. The purpose of government is to facilitate the pursuit of happiness of its citizens.
Understandings
As I set out to explore this strange but useful concept called “the pursuit of happiness,” two understandings:
NO EQUATIONS
First, I will not be suggesting that we try to assess the “happiness yield” of a given policy. If catalytic converters are proposed as a way of reducing air pollution then air pollution remains the immediate problem at which they are directed and we had better do a hard-headed job of deciding whether catalytic converters are a good way to achieve that immediate goal. Nor shall I be trying to quantify a “happiness index” by which we may measure progress or retrogression. My goal is to make use of the idea of happiness, not trivialize it.
Rather, as I will be arguing in the chapters that follow, the concept of happiness gives us a new place to stand in assessing social policy. New places to stand offer new perspectives and can give better leverage on old problems. I will be arguing that the pursuit-of-happiness criterion gives us a valuable way of thinking about solutions, even when that way of thinking does not necessarily point us toward “the” solution.
NO ROSE GARDENS
I will be discussing the pursuit of happiness as it relates to social policy rather than the achievement of happiness. Only the former can be a “right.” The latter is not within the gift of any government.
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It is equally obvious, however, that the concept of “ability to pursue happiness” is not met simply by dubbing someone free to do so. You cannot pursue happiness effectively if you are starving or suffering other severe deprivations. You may meet misfortune with fortitude; you may extract from your situation what contentment is possible; but you may not reasonably be said to be “free to pursue happiness” under such conditions. “Pursuit” requires that certain conditions prevail, and part 2 explores the conditions that are most immediately relevant to government policies.
But neither does “enabled to pursue happiness” translate into a high probability of achieving whatever you set out to achieve. “Not that I would not, if I could,” writes William James, “be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible.”7 Similarly, you cannot reasonably ask that you be enabled to achieve any particular sort of happiness you might prefer. “Ability to pursue happiness” will be treated as meaning that no one and no external objective condition controlled by government will prevent you from living a life that provides you with happiness. It may not be the most satisfying life you can imagine in its detail. Others with no greater merit than you (as you see it) may lead lives that you would prefer to live. But you will have the wherewithal for realizing deep and meaningful satisfactions in life. If you reach the end of your life unhappy, it will be your fault, or the fault of natural tragedies beyond the power of society to prevent.
And with that, we have cleared away enough underbrush to begin. Just as war is too important to be left to generals, so is happiness too important to be left to philosophers. It is a word with content that bridges widely varying political views. It lends itself to thinking about, puzzling over, playing with. Doing so can profoundly affect how we conceive of good laws, social justice, and some very practical improvements in the quality of American life.
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