"Pursuit" doesn't imply a lack of competition. You can pursue something all you like without ever having a chance to get it, through any number of obstacles. You're still treating it as a right to ever achieve fundamental happiness, which it's not, and which in a philosophical sense the framers would probably have regarded as impossible. True happiness is what happens when you die and go to Heaven, at best, and lots of them didn't even believe that.
Really the whole concept of a 'pursuit of happiness' as something to be protected on a broad social level is so vague as to be nearly meaningless, which is I think where these wierd interpretations come from. While it's sort of a stance against pure oppression for the sake of oppression, and kinda-sorta-maybe a protection of religion, the primary significance of the term is in what it omits - in the normal expression 'property' was the third article. The context is everything. There's a reason this airy-fairy language stayed in the Declaration didn't get into the Constitution, where it'd be a right the government was actually compelled to uphold. It's mostly a 'screw you' to the ownership claims the crown held over the colonies.
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Date: 5/4/10 17:45 (UTC)Really the whole concept of a 'pursuit of happiness' as something to be protected on a broad social level is so vague as to be nearly meaningless, which is I think where these wierd interpretations come from. While it's sort of a stance against pure oppression for the sake of oppression, and kinda-sorta-maybe a protection of religion, the primary significance of the term is in what it omits - in the normal expression 'property' was the third article. The context is everything. There's a reason this airy-fairy language stayed in the Declaration didn't get into the Constitution, where it'd be a right the government was actually compelled to uphold. It's mostly a 'screw you' to the ownership claims the crown held over the colonies.