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Originally posted by Richard English:
I think one of the problems about defining happiness is that it's a very imprecise word.

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Kalleh, isn't it about time you brought up schadenfreude?

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Originally posted by neveu:
Perhaps it's something to be pursued rather than attained.

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Originally posted by Asa Lovejoy:
Ironic, Pearce, that it is doomed to failure, but deemed a cause worth fighting a revolution over. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is in the US Declaration of Independence.

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e.g. success after working for a difficult exam or job interview

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I thought this phrase was code for the original, Lockean one: estate or property

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To non-Americans, talk of "the pursuit of happiness" can seem an amazing mixture of the simpleminded and the complex. What seems simple is that happiness is so straightforward that we all have a right -- a right!-- to seek it; what seems complex is the idea that what we're entitled to is, indeed, a pursuit, something strenuous and not necessarily successful. Some Marxists have thought that the right to pursue happiness was a last minute substitution for a previously drafted right to property, but [Darrin] McMahon [author of Happiness: A History] makes short work of that conspiracy theory. He points out that the Founding Fathers, who queried, crossed out, and haggled over every line of the Declaration, let the "pursuit of Happiness" stand unedited and unamended. But he also points out that the eighteenth-century understanding of "pursuit" was rather darker than it might seem now. Dr. Johnson's dictionary defined it as "the act of following with hostile intention," and McMahon adds that "if one thinks of pursuing happiness as one pursues a fugitive...the 'pursuit of happiness' takes on a somewhat different cast."

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§87. Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom, and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power, not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men; but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it. But because no political society can be, nor subsist, without having in itself the power to preserve the property, and, in order thereunto, punish the offences of all those of that society; there and there only is political society, where every one of the members hath quitted his natural power, resigned it up into the hands of the community in all cases that excludes him not from appealing for protection to the law established by it.

[John Locke. Two Treatises of Government (link).]

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All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

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I willing to concede that Jefferson may have just meant pursuing happiness

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The end of all political associations, is, the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.

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Yes. But wars have been fought over many such useless quests, power, lands, economies and indeed the pursuit of happiness. Man doesn't seem to learn from his history.

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Originally posted by Richard English:
I suppose that my main objection is that, by implication, the popular practice of fellatio is "disgusting, disagreeable or offensive". I am particularly irritated by the apparently common belief that there is something "not quite nice" about sex.

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[Adams] says 'the committee (of 5. to wit, Dr Franklin, Sherman, Livingston and ourselves) met, discussed the subject, and then appointed him and myself to make the draught: that we, as a subcommittee met, & after the urgencies of each on the other, I consented to undertake the task; that the draught being made, we, the subcommittee, met, & conned the paper over, and he does not remember that he made or suggested a single alteration.' now these details are quite incorrect, the committee of 5. met, no such thing as a subcommittee was proposed, but they unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught. I consented; I drew it; but before I reported it to the committee, I communicated it separately to Dr Franklin and mr Adams requesting their corrections; because they were the two members of whose judgments and amendments I wished most to have the benefit before presenting it to the Committee; and you have seen the original paper now in my hands, with the corrections of Doctor Franklin and mr Adams interlined in their own handwritings.

their alterations were two or three only, and merely verbal. I then wrote a fair copy, reported it to the Committee, and from them, unaltered to Congress, this personal communication and consultation with mr Adams he has misremembered into the meetings of a sub-committee.

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The most well written and insightful critique of Wills's work was done by Ronald Hamowy. Hamowy held fast to the Lockean interpretation as he noted errors of explanation and fact in Wills's argument. Wills's argument that Jefferson's substitution of "pursuit of happiness" for Locke's "property" was proof that Hutcheson--not Locke--was the influence for the Declaration was destroyed by Hamowy. "If Jefferson chose to substitute the broader "pursuit of happiness" for "property" in his list of inalienable rights, it certainly was not because he substituted Hutcheson's notion of property for Locke's. There are simply no significant differences between the two thinkers on the subject." Both philosophers argued that the right to property was inalienable, but they simply did so in different fashions.

Although fascinating, Wills's argument was not convincing. He constantly stretched Jefferson's phrases to apply them to the Scottish Enlightenment. Wills also failed to compare the close links between Locke and Hutcheson. Although Hutcheson and the other Scottish philosophers were no doubt important to Jefferson, the Declaration too closely resembles Lockean political theory for Hutcheson to replace Locke as the major influence for Jefferson.

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Originally posted by zmježd:

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[Adams] says... I communicated it separately to Dr Franklin and mr Adams requesting their corrections;

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The Americans are eagerly swallowing this analysis of our national psyche.

Mr Weiner's book is reportedly hurtling off bookshop shelves over there. No doubt, many of his eager buyers are paid-up members of America's anti-British squad.

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He probably has good cause to be twitchy. Many of us do, indeed, find American chirpiness tiresome and fake.