Foundations of a Nation
To understand the foundations of America, we need to dig into the key texts and thinkers who have helped define our nation. On the "Foundations of a Nation" podcast Alex Tuckness, Chair of the Political Science Department at Iowa State University, talks with his friend, Barrett Randall, about the ideas that have shaped America. Season 1 looks at the Declaration of Independence."
Foundations of a Nation
Rights and the Declaration
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Barrett and Alex talk about rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and about what it means for rights to be "unalienable." They also talk about how this is not a complete list of rights and what the founders thought about the right to property.
To understand the foundations of America, we need to dig into the key texts and thinkers who've helped define our nation. I'm Barrett Randall, and I'm not an academic, but I'm also not afraid to talk to one. On the Foundations of a Nation podcast, I have conversations with my friend Alex Tuckness, Chair of the Political Science Department at Iowa State University, about the ideas that have shaped America. Welcome to the Foundations of a Nation podcast. I'm Barrett Randall, and I run a golf course. I'm Alex Tuckness, I'm a political science professor. And we're going to be your hosts. In season one, we're looking at the Declaration of Independence. And in this episode, we're going to be talking about unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Alex, what does that mean?
SPEAKER_00What does that mean? Well, like one of the things I would say is interesting is talking about rights in this way is actually a somewhat like recent development. You know, and you know, obviously I study the history of political thought. So for me, like, you know, the last couple centuries that, you know, means fairly recent, you know. Um but like historically, people might have rights, but they would typically have rights related to a particular position or status that they have. Like as a member of the nobility, I have the set of rights.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell or a Roman citizen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, as a Roman citizen, I have this, you know, the set of rights. Okay. But the the idea that, you know, as a human being, there's a certain sort of rights that I have, meaning that you have a duty to not interfere with me or harm me with respect to these things where I have rights is actually a fairly kind of new way of talking about things. So I think it's really like in the 1600s, 1700s, right, that this way of thinking starts to become more popular. And it's interesting because like rights has so saturated the way we talk about politics now that it just seems like completely normal to us. Um but I'm just saying, like sentences like this you didn't hear uh that often in the Middle Ages, right? And it's not because they didn't believe that people were created by God, and it's not because they didn't believe people had certain kinds of duties to each other. I mean, they would have believed those things. But you know, these kind of abstract rights that apply to all human beings, um yeah, is a little bit more recent, recent development.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Yeah, I never I actually never thought about that. Because you're right. I mean, it's something we take for granted. Um even when looking back and reading the Declaration, we think, well, yeah, of course. But it it wasn't.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I so historically, a little background. So I I think I think part of the reason why in the 1600s and 1700s this becomes more popular is there's a couple of things going on in the world globally, right? So one is the Protestant Reformation, right? So the Protestant Reformation starts uh even earlier in the 1500s. And part of what happens is the Protestant Reformation kind of takes hold, is now there's no longer like a shared acknowledged religious authority, right? Because some people follow the Pope, some people don't. So you don't have like an institutional structure within the church to settle disputes that everybody recognizes, right? So you've got that going on. But then you also have uh, you know, European colonization going on where, you know, settlements are being set up all, you know, all across the globe, and there's a lot more interaction with people from other non-European cultures. Yeah. And so both of those start causing people to say, what we really should have, right, and be able to use to settle our disputes is some higher universal law that isn't specific to any particular place or culture, but it applies to everyone everywhere, right? Because in theory, a law like that could be something that you could use to settle disputes, you know, internationally, cross-culturally, across religious boundaries, and things like that. And so that gives you a particular way of thinking about what they would have called a law of nature, right? Which is this kind of duty that all of us have as human beings. But then the other thing that happens, right, is that idea of a natural law kind of gets flipped over to talk about natural rights, where a law typically we think of that as saying, well, here's the things you have to do, right? Here are your duties. Sure. Rights are more like a way of saying, here's the duties I have the right to expect from you. Uh, you know, here's what you're entitled to. Yeah. This is I'm entitled, like you have certain duties to respect these rights of mine. Um, and so that way of thinking about things also, I think, um, is encouraged by a sort of growing individualism, right? The idea that like as individuals I have the right to assert claims for myself as an individual. You know, the Protestant Reformation probably ties into that a little bit, uh, a little bit as well.
SPEAKER_01So then when they write like you have this right to life, what do they mean by that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's yeah, very good. So one of the things to say, right? So we've talked in earlier episodes, uh, you know, I spent a lot of time looking at John Locke, and I think he's kind of a helpful place to start. Um so Locke's original formulation was that people have a right to life, liberty, and property. You know, obviously it gets changed a little bit. We'll talk a little bit here in a second about why it gets changed from property to pursuit of happiness. But if we start with the life part, what Locke would have said is because we are created equal, right? In other words, we are all created by God. Yeah, we are all ultimately God's property. Uh, and because we are God's property, to kill another human being is basically to take something that doesn't belong to you.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_00Right? Your life doesn't belong to me, my life doesn't belong to you. And so there's a sense in which the status we have um of being gods makes it wrong for us to deprive each other of life. So, I mean, at a simple way, he means like don't go around murdering each other.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right. Um, and and if you do, uh there's kind of a basic moral right that the other person had that is being uh that's being violated. Yeah. Um so we have life, then we have liberty. Right. Um you know, one of the things that's interesting about liberty, right, is obviously, you know, the last episode we were talking about slavery. Uh slavery is a pretty obvious restriction uh on a person's liberty, right? Yes. You know, so so so at a certain level we may think, well, liberty is the right to do whatever I want to do. Um that's not actually how Locke thought about it. Um so what Locke would have said is in the first instance, the right to liberty means that I have a right to kind of direct my own affairs, choose my kind of path of life that I want to live within the bounds of the law of nature. Right. So some of the things I might want to do might involve stealing from you or, you know, enslaving you or killing you and things like that. And the Locke would say to start off with no. Okay. Like you don't get to do that. Right. So for him, liberty is constrained by a set of moral principles. So liberty doesn't mean the the liberty to do whatever you want. Liberty is, you know, choosing the path of life you want to live within a set of moral constraints that apply to other people. And his point would be that vision of liberty is actually a better vision of liberty because you know, if we all have the liberty to do anything we want, then none of us are going to be very secure because anybody we run into could be, you know, stealing from us, beating us up, assaulting us, you know, killing us, things like that. Right. We we need this kind of mutual respect of rights in order to have the space and stability to actually be able to make meaningful choices and make meaningful use of our liberty.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Yeah. So all men are created equal and can pursue the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So life, these are all camped in this moral framework. Right. So then let's talk about pursuit of happiness. What is that, how does that fit in?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So so let me let me I want to I want to kind of contrast this a little bit with property, right? So remember uh we talked about this in an earlier episode. Walk's formulation of this was life, liberty, and property. Right. Uh Jefferson has, you know, at his desk as he's working on the draft for this, uh some work by George Mason, who also talks about life, liberty, and property. And he's he's like almost quoting uh Mason, right, in in in a lot of places going through it. And Mason's uh steeped in Locke, right? So it's kind of indirect. So why is it that we, you know, that this switches from property to um pursuit of happiness? Well, the first thing I would say is it didn't shift because Jefferson didn't think there was a right to property. Uh and so in the language of the declaration, it's it's it's important that it says uh that among these rights are the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Right. So in other words, it's not trying to give an exhaustive list of all the rights we have. So property not being mentioned there doesn't mean they don't think there's a right to property. It just means this is not like a complete list of all of the uh of all of the rights. Um of the reasons pursuit of happiness actually may have been um put in this is an interesting point. So so Danielle Allen has written a book on the Declaration of Independence, she talks about this. Um thinks that in the historical context when the declaration was being written, there were slave owners who were using the idea of a right to property and applying that primarily to their right to like maintain ownership of their slaves, because the slaves are their property. And so, you know, we talked in the last episode about how Jefferson's original draft actually had a lot of language critiquing the slave trade.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_00And so he may have taken property out and put pursuit of happiness in uh because of the way certain people, not everybody, but if some people in that historical area were using the right to property, you know, as a justification for slavery.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr. Misapplying Locke's original intent.
SPEAKER_00And by the way, so interestingly, like Locke's view on slavery was that in general slavery is wrong. The only possible instance where a like a form of slavery would be legal is as punishment for a crime. So imagine the following scenario. Suppose person A like tries to murder person B, but is stopped. But uh the penalty for attempted murder is death. And so uh the person who was attacked actually has the right now to put the attacker to death, justly. You could offer the person a deal and say, I tell you what, uh, would you rather be my slave than die? And Locke thought it was okay, right? If you if you offered somebody a better deal, but it would only be justifiable if the person had actually done something, you know, reasonably punishable by death. What that would never allow was something like the system of race-based slavery that the United States had, where people are slaves, they're just born into slavery because they had the misfortune that their parents were slaves, and the way their parents were slaves is they were just kind of kidnapped from Africa and brought over on a slave boat. But there are interesting uh parallels in American history. So after the Civil War, when we passed the 13th Amendment uh that says you're not allowed, you know, no slavery and indentured servitude, um, there's actually an exception for punishment for crimes uh that's actually included in the 13th Amendment, which is a very Lockheed and kind of thing. And here's what they were thinking about. Sometimes, we still do this, sometimes people are put in prison and asked to do labor while they're in prison.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_00You know, so if you think somebody doing manual labor in a chain. Yeah, like a chain gang. Yeah. Right? That's slavery. Right? I mean, they have no liberty, they're being confined, they're being forced to work. Right. But uh the claim would be it's it's legal to do that if it's a punishment for a crime. Sure. But you can't just sort of do that more generally. So anyway, that was Locke's view. There's there's other people who are also influential. I think we talked about Francis Hutchinson in an earlier episode, similar to Locke, but he actually goes further than Locke and just says, no, we we shouldn't even use the word slavery. Like we should, you know, got it uh, you know, say say no to all of it. So that's why property was kind of left out. Yeah, yeah. So I I think that may be why it was, but not because they didn't believe in a right to property. Right? And and so like if you were to go forward uh, you know, just a few years to when they're writing the Constitution, like if you look in the Federalist papers, uh hopefully, you know, we'll we'll if we keep recording episodes long enough, we'll eventually get up to uh this part of the Constitution. But in Federalist 10, they're really worried about factions. You know, James Madison is writing, and one of the factions he's really worried about is uh a faction of the poor who are going to use their superior numbers to take away the property of the rich.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right. And so defending property rights is actually a very widespread view uh among the founders. So the the the omission of um property may have been this kind of strategic thing with some of the the way it was being being linked to slavery, but it wasn't taken out because they didn't think there was one. Uh one other thing to mention, this is another like interesting John Locke point. Uh Locke in his essay concerning human understanding has a theory of human nature uh where he thinks human beings are just sort of like intrinsically wired uh to pursue pleasure and to avoid pain. Um, and that that's what motivates us. And so basically, almost everything we do is at some level motivated by thinking somehow this will make me happy. Right. Now we may be completely misguided. Like human beings can can have uh very incorrect views about which actions will lead them to happiness. Sure. Uh sometimes we kind of know intuitively, but Locke thinks we don't kind of like his phrase was uneasiness, right? We somehow the rational thing we know we should do, we're not quite able to motivate ourselves to do. So I mean he's aware that that happens as well. Uh but the point would be the idea of having liberty to pursue your happiness is actually a very Lockean idea, too, right? Given that, you know, he he thinks this is kind of like baked into human nature, right? That we naturally uh naturally pursue our happiness.
SPEAKER_01Got it. Color me confused. Can you explain unalienable?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. So as simply a simple way of putting it is to alienate is to like separate something from yourself, right? So alien kind of means like other, separate, right? Yeah. So uh to say something is unalienable is to basically say you can't give it up. Right? Uh and so so here'd be a simple ex example, you know. Um if if somebody gets arrested, you know, in a good crime show, police show, and say, you know, you have the right to remain silent. Uh, you know, you have the right to, you know, if you choose to waive that right, anything you say or do may be used against you in court. Right. So that is describing an a right that is alienable, right? You have a right to remain silent, but you, you know, you can give up that right. You, you know, you can you can choose to speak anyway. And they're saying there's some rights that you don't even have the power to give away. So like another example would be um like if somebody's uh you know below age, so they're they're you know, 13 or whatever, they're minor, um they could like try to like you know sign a contract giving away their stuff, but it's not legally binding. They don't actually have the power to alienate things. Sure. Right. Um so the context here is saying that these rights to life, liberty, and property, or in in the declarations like life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, those are rights you cannot like fully give away. Now, you could still, like my my analogy breaks down a little bit. You could still choose not to exercise them at a particular point, right? I might have a right to remain silent, and today I decide to use that right, tomorrow I decide not to. That's okay. What I can't do is like give up the right once and for all, all right, to never be able to use it again. So the the reason why this was important is this is kind of a tie-in to what we're gonna be talking about in the next episode. So the next episode is gonna be talking about this kind of contract that exists between the people and the government, where the government is supposed to be protecting our rights and we're supposed to like hold the government accountable for whether it's done that or not. Yeah. John Locke was one influential political thinker from the 1600s, but there were some others. So a couple others that are important are Thomas Hobbes and uh my my favorite one uh uh name is Pufendorf. I just love saying Puffendorf. Now I get to say it on a phone.
SPEAKER_01If it makes you feel better, I'm stuck on Calvin. Calvin and Hobbes.
SPEAKER_00Calvin Interesting side note. So this is the Hobbes that Hobbes is actually named after.
SPEAKER_01Of course.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and Calvin is named after. Yeah, so in the comic strip. So Calvin Coolidge. Uh no, Calvin the Theology, John Calvin the theologian. John Calvin. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I did not know that. Yeah. I love it even more. That's where they were named.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Wonderful. Um so what both of them thought is like, you know, Hobbes would say, yes, you have a natural right to liberty. And then the king can come up to you and say, uh, do you see all these soldiers I have standing behind me? I suggest that you alienate your liberty to me. You give your liberty to me. I'll take care of it from now on. And uh, if you agree, you get to stay alive. And if you don't, one of my soldiers is going to kill you. Would you like to alienate your liberty now? I would not. You would not. Well, but if the soldiers were really standing behind you, you might go ahead and say, Well, I would not like to, but I might. Right.
SPEAKER_01So I would also not feel like it is a choice.
SPEAKER_00Right. So so Hobbes has a theory where there's a social contract going on, but it's one where you can alienate all of these rights to the sovereign, and now the sovereign has them and he can do whatever he wants. So by saying these rights are unalienable, it's a way of saying that the king or the president or the government, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It may have powers to help protect those rights, but ultimately the rights continue to reside with the people. And we can't take, say, our right to liberty and just alienate that once and for all to the king and no longer have a right to liberty anymore. Sure. Um, and so yeah, so so that's the big idea. And like I said, we can talk about that more next time. Yeah. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of Iowa State University. Thank you for listening.