Man 1: "We hold these truths to be self-evident,
"that all men are created equal,
"that they are endowed by their Creator
"with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
"Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
It's this amazing second sentence
of the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson
and Adams and Franklin wrote as part of a committee
and we were looking at that sentence.
Let's go on to look at that phrase, "they are endowed
"by their Creator."
It's interesting, they don't really mention Jesus Christ
and not even God.
They talk about the laws of nature and of nature's god
and a creator.
These are deists, people who believe in the notion
that there's some grand creator of the universe,
but they don't get into the specifics of any particular
religious dogma.
The other thing is they're balancing where do our rights
come from?
In an earlier draft, and we'll talk about how they edit
the earlier drafts in a later video, but in an earlier draft
it just says they're endowed
with certain unalienable rights and you see
that John Adams, probably, is the one who wants
to insert the phrase "their Creator" and that was
because they started the sentence
with "We hold these truths to be sacred,"
but they changed that to "self-evident."
They're trying to say to what extent is it rationality
that gives us these rights, to what extent
are these rights endowed by God
and I think what they finally come down to is
that we all had a creator and that creator made us all.
So, to a certain sync, we're created equal.
Our creator must love us all, we are all created
by the same creator, therefore there's a certain equality
that we have and in creating us, he gave us
certain unalienable rights.
Man 2: Unalienable just means can't be taken away.
It can't be separated.
Man 1: It can't be separated.
You can't take these rights away.
The king can't take these rights away.
In other words, it's not as if we could give up
these rights and in particular, they are talking
about this theory of government that John Locke had,
who was one of the philosophers that they read,
an English philosopher of that period,
who said that when you created government
or there is a government, you give up some
of your rights.
For example, if we all agree that we're part
of a government, we may give up our right
to take somebody else's property or whatever it may be.
These are rights you can give up,
but there are certain rights that are unalienable,
that you just can't give up or the king can't take it away.
Once again, you've got to look at Thomas Jefferson,
who actually owned slaves at this point
and he's saying among those unalienable rights
are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
There's this inherent conflict still, between rights,
such as liberty, that you can't take away from a person
and yet, Jefferson's writing this phrase
when he owns slaves.
The phrase "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness"
is also something that derives from John Locke
and these philosophers of the Enlightenment
that were writing in England.
At one point, John Locke uses the phrase "Life, Liberty,
"and the pursuit of property," because Locke believed
that owning property was an important right you had
and the government couldn't just take
your property away.
However, you can see that they change it
to a more elevated phrase (laughter) that we each get
to pursue our own notion of what we want to do
in our lives, our happiness.
I don't think they just mean happiness like joy
and frivolity.
I think they mean pursuit of meaning in life,
what gives our life meaning
and these are the unalienable rights.
Then they go on and this gets
to what's called the contract notion of government,
is that why do we have governments?
Whether it's John Locke or the other philosophers
we've talked about, they say the reason
we have government is that we all had these rights,
but we decided to get together.
We instituted governments.
Governments are instituted and the reason
those governments have their power is because
of the consent of the governed.
It's like if you and I and 20 people got together
and formed a group and we said, "We're going to form
"a group, we'll give up some of our rights,
"because the group itself will have certain powers,
"but we're consenting to do that."
It's not because of the divine right of kings.
It's the consent of the governed.
The consent of the people says we will institute
a government amongst ourselves
and that's not to take away our rights,
that's to secure our rights.
Man 2: Right.
I might ...
The 20 of us might give up our right to enforce things,
police each other, to the government,
so that we could have our life, liberty,
and pursuit of happiness.
We're more likely to have it secured.
Man 1: Once you get to that theory, you have to say,
"What are the type of rights we would give up?"
Such as, maybe, the right to decide the traffic laws
or the policing of the thing, or how property contracts
are made, but there are certain things that,
no matter what you did, if you were instituting
a government among men, you would not give up
the right to life, you would not give up the right
to liberty, and you would not say, "I'm going to give up
"my right to pursue my own life ends,
"my own happiness."
You would say, "We want to secure those rights.
"We're not going to give those up to government."