Talk:Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

message: Where/when does he say "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property?" I can't find it anywhere.Jjmckool 12:49, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adam Smith 

message: I heard an interview on NPR regarding the pursuit of happiness and was hoping someone else remembers - it was in the last two years. The interviewed person traced the phrase from its origins as meaning (roughly) the ability to work in one's chosen field (property + happiness). He went on to say that in Europe at the time, a favorite way to destroy someone was to prevent them from doing so, and that this meaning was very much recognized and intended when written into the Declaration of Independence. 
Does anyone here have a link to the interview or know who the author is?  PatriotSurvivor 22:52, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  pursuit of happiness  

message: Will Wilkinson: In Pursuit of Happiness Research: Is It Reliable? What Does It Imply for Policy? (PDF; 771 KB), Cato Institute, April 11, 2007 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 172.158.16.21 (talk) 22:19, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Study 

message: Just a thought: I believe things that make people happy now is very different from what it was
fifty years ago.
Scenerio 1-
   "She smiled at me"...boy+smile= a VERY CONTENT HAPPY
Scenerio 2-
   "Yeah well I got laid"...boy+laid= eggghhh
My point is. It seems it gets harder and harder to find true happiness. Why is that?
Is it the selfishness of society?
End of thought:Lolahothot 22:23, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  A modern pursuit of Happiness 

message: The entry says "Adam Smith coined the phrase 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of property'. The expression 'pursuit of happiness' was coined by Dr. Samuel Johnson in his 1759 novel Rasselas."  However, David Hume uses this phrase in his 1748 edition of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. So, how can this be "coined" by Dr. Johnson?
131.216.167.221 01:33, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question regarding "pursuit of happiness" 

message: I still need to translate to English this manifesto where I specifically included an important consideration about Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness :
+ "Un Lema Global" (Pending translation)
I intend to translate it as soon as I can , but if someone could advance me a translation, I'd be sincerely grateful.
--Faustinonh 00:37, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  An important consideration 

message: I have always had difficulty understanding this statement. Liberty seems to be the only straightforward one. (That an individual has the right to act in a manner that does not harm other individuals’ ability too do the same) What on earth is life? Is it the ability to stay alive? Seems like a rather crappy inalienable right. (And since when did I need the government's or God's consent to be alive?) I really don't understand the pursuit of happiness either. If it were the idea the each individual had the ability to pursue their one happiness, it would have to be tempered the fact that many peoples pursuit of happiness would overlap, or destroy another’s pursuit of happiness. (A child-molester’s pursuit of happiness would inhibit the child's pursuit of happiness) Field’s and Miller's definition seems to be insufficient. The pursuit of happiness, (Or any of the 'inalienable rights') should not be tempered by law. For this would make the statement of the inalienable rights irrelevant. All laws would be ad hoc, their would be no higher authority (not necessarily God, could be a set of moral ways to govern) This would destroy any relevance to the Supreme Court, or any Constitutional Court.
If what I have said makes any sense to you, please respond. If you think I am wrong, please respond. And if you believe that you have a special incite on the matter, please respond. (RorikStrindberg (talk) 05:25, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: See my entry below on Aristotelian Happiness. When happiness is understood as the cardinal virtue (because it exists for its own sake, not for something else, and in order to achieve it, life must be in balance - happiness is not the same as pleasure), Then the progression of Life which is a necessary precondition for Liberty within which one pursues the (Virtue of) Happiness. This then becomes a moral imperative, and can be considered in reverse. Those who pursue virtue have enough responsibility to have liberty, and thus deserve to live as free and virtuous human beings in a society of free and virtuous human beings.  John Elder (talk) 19:14, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

text: Two excellent comments.  However, Wikipedia likes citations.  Life and Liberty were common slogans of the period; "life, liberty, and property" was also common.  John Locke seems the instigator of the "rights" to life and property with his theory of Natural Rights -- an idea that came into the Colonial Mind at the time of the Stamp Act Congress, but his use of "the purusit of happiness", if anything,contradicts the Declaration.  The change from these "rights" based statements to ones that connote a moral obligation was one of the great advances of the Declaration over the previous mere political slogans.  Indeed, as JohnElder perceptively points out,the phrase is involved with the Enlightenment idea of Virtue.  However, in the spirit of Wikipedia, it might be best to cite sources for this, and how it came into the American mind of not just Jefferson, but the Committee of Five and all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. I'll add a section documenting the vector of the introduction, and perhaps mention some alternative slogans like "life, liberty, and property" that were rejected.  As to understanding of a relative happiness being destructive of morality, the men of the times knew of this issue: the great American Educator President (of King's College) Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson in his seven editions of his work on moral philosophy taught in Colonial Colleges used to habitually write "highest Happiness", "true Happiness", and "chief Happiness"; but a political document doesn't have be that precise.  The American educator Johnson claimed that learning, morality, and religion were your true, highest, and chief "happiness", and you should pursue them by studying them and "the universal practice of virtue". Some of his statements should be cited as he was influential in the period.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Harrycroswell (talk • contribs) 18:23, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  ??? 

message: The article currently includes the following:
... the exact quote, as written in the original document is "life, liberty, and the pursuit of personal happiness."
I can't find that phrase in the document. The site http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/document/compare.htm shows the Declaration text along with multiple draft versions, and I can't find it in any of the versions.
Can whoever put that claim in there provide a reference, perhaps?
WorldAsWill (talk) 07:32, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pursuit of Personal Happiness 

message: Could someone try to incorporate this material into this article? 
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/leiblock.htm#happines
Hoped Offer (talk) 17:57, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Leibniz associated "natural right" with "happiness" in the introduction to his 1693 Codex Iuris Gentium.  Burlamaqui's recent editor associates Burlamaqui's thought with Leibniz.  Burlamaqui was widely read in the American colonies.  The very first paragraph of his Principles of Natural and Politic Law refers to the "noble pursuit" of "true and solid happiness."--Other Choices (talk) 11:15, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Leibniz, not Locke, inspired the Declaration of Independence 

message: The first paragraph under "Phrasing" is unclear and confusing.  This is due to two problems.  The first, and probably most important, is simply that the wording of the paragraph does not present its ideas clearly and concisely; this is largely due to its contradictory claims (it is stated that Jefferson borrowed the phrase from Locke and was uninfluenced by Locke in the span of two sentences before claiming that the matter is ambiguous), likely caused by multiple authors trying to present their diverse positions without reference to the coherence of the piece.  The second is that one of the main ideas presented seems weak. The jist one arguement within the paragraph seemingly suggests that Jefferson may have made up the phrase independent of John Locke; the author goes to great lengths to (presumably) present Jefferson's ideas as original, I suppose for the purpose of maintaining a lionized view of him (though I could be reading too much into this).  I'd be happy to see a better written and well sourced version of this argument, but as presented the idea that Jefferson hadn't read that particular work of Locke because it hadn't been approved in Virginia seems ridiculous.  Locke had been dead for over 70 years before the penning of the Declaration, and moreover even if Locke's work wasn't approved in Virginia at the time, a worldly and wealthy landowner such as Jefferson would have likely had little difficulty procuring a copy of his work.  Like I said, if this argument can be better written and contextualized (which needs to happen regardless), that is fine, but otherwise it should be removed.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.56.50.108 (talk) 05:52, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unclear 

message: This is a totally subjective description of the phrase, and doesn't belong in the first paragraph, let alone the first sentence. Feel free to move it somewhere else in the article, as I don't dispute that somebody has this wonderful opinion, but judgements of quality are not an objective fact. I'm not saying its not a well-written phrase, but that could be said about any famous phrase - there's just no way to objectively rank "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" against "give me liberty or give me death" or "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet". --Blazerbryant (talk) 01:34, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  "...well crafted, influential sentences in the history of the English language" 

message: I'm not sure what kind of journalistic absurdism legitimizes destroying the grammatical integrity of a quite well-structured statement, but the title of this article needs the serial comma as well, and I can't see where to edit that. Does the entire page need to be moved? I would appreciate if someone with more Wikicode experience could handle that. Thank you! --76.20.39.78 (talk) 03:29, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The images I've seen that look like this one don't have the comma. The ones like look like this one do. RJC TalkContribs 18:35, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: While this is OR, I have emailed the librarian of the LOC years ago about this issue. The serial comma was not part of the original DOI. It was placed by the printer on the broadside which is what most of us are using as reproductions of the DOI, since the original is too badly damaged. Sir Joseph (talk) 20:33, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  The original text contains the serial comma. 

message: Okay, I made this edit, which was inconsistent because I only decapped "Liberty" and failed to decap "Happiness".  My edit was reverted with this edit, with a suggestion to bring this up here on the talk page.
My contention is that the article title should be consistent with the title in the first sentence of the lead.  That seems to be the conventional formatting.  If we use quotation marks to emphasize that the title is a quote from, in this case, a document, then both the title in the lead and the article title itself should be formatted with uppercase letters, as in Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  This is probably one of those issues that has been discussed numerous times in the past, so if my contention has already been deemed less desirable than the present formatting of Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then would this be one of those rare cases when it is okay for the lead and the article title to differ?  I have not been able to find an example quite like this (famous quotation) in the policy or the MOS. – Paine Ellsworth CLIMAX! 16:37, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that both should match, but I thought discussion might be good to determine which version was used. I would suggest that the most common usage by far is "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" (as it appears in the Declaration of Independence) and "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" (capital P, title case, as it appears in what seems to be a very significant number of Google results compared to the Declaration version). The question is, which to use. I favour the Declaration version, since that is the origin, and it seems the capitalised words could, in a way, be considered proper nouns in this usage. Of course, the proper title case version also has arguments in its favour. What are your thoughts? — Huntster (t @ c) 04:29, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: In 18th-century English America, it was still customary to capitalize all nouns (as is still done in the German language today).  I don't think it's a good idea to follow this archaic style point in a wikipedia article.--Other Choices (talk) 10:07, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: It usually is not a good idea to follow archaic styles; however, this article is about the quotation itself as noted in the lead section.  Any article about a famous quotation would be expected by readers to have its title formatted in the same manner as the quotation is formatted in the original document.  So I would have to agree that the article title should follow the format of the quotation and use the style that Jefferson used in the handwritten Declaration of Independence.  The article title should appear as Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – Paine Ellsworth CLIMAX! 17:12, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Uppercase in lede title 

message: In the lead section of the article, and in this talk discussion, there is the outright statement or implicit implication that the phrase is Jefferson's.  Jefferson did not originality write this; his first draft went, "We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness;"  Most likely Franklin (or possibly Adams, or one of the other two members of the Committee of Five) tightened the loose legalistic phrase. This should be noted as it affects the "source" question.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Harrycroswell (talk • contribs) 18:43, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  It is not Jefferson's quote 

message: If a sadistic person pursues happiness, they would need to take liberty and lives. --2.245.139.122 (talk) 13:56, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contradiction 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I've added a "Confusing" tag to the section entitled "Meaning of 'happiness'". This section feels, to me, like a bit of an overstretch of the sources. In this case: 1 and 2. While the sources do discuss the meaning of the phrase "pursuit of happiness", neither of them seems to suggest that the meaning of the word 'happiness' used in 1776 is significantly different from the way it's used today. Indeed, the provided definition "good fortune, prosperity, thriving, wellbeing" shouldn't be a revelation to an English-speaker in 2018. Isn't that exactly what we thought it meant? Do the sources themselves seem to push the idea that the definition has changed or are they merely being used to support an original thought for this article? It's also unclear what "this is not seriously disputed" means. What isn't disputed? It seems to me that this section should be merged into the general article body as I don't see any serious dichotomy between the definition provided and the general understanding of the phrase. Please let me know if you have any opinions or insights. Thank you. Scoundr3l (talk) 22:43, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: After a little further digging, it appears that this section may be a bit of a Frankenstein. Recently this  removed some of the content and added the "This is not seriously disputed" as a response to what previously stated there was debate over the meaning of happiness. As evidence, the previous section linked to two blog articles about the meaning of happiness with no real context to the Declaration of Independence. As such, I feel more confident in suggesting the content be merged as OR. However, I leave it open to discussion if anyone else has any thoughts. Scoundr3l (talk) 22:56, 26 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusing