The Lockean Dilemma

(and the Froth of July)
By Dr. Bob Wenz

Andrew, like many of my introductory philosophy students with an attitude, chose to sit in the back row of the class as I began to preview the course on day one.  Touching upon the subject of ontology, which we would study more fully later, I asked whether students considered themselves to be “created beings” or the “products of 220 million years of random evolutionary processes.” Andrew quickly staked out the evolutionary position.

I followed up with Andrew, quoting from the Declaration of Independence:

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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

He suggested that Jefferson was totally wrong, thereby disavowing the foundational document of the American experiment.  We ought not to be surprised, for Andrew speaks for many today who make own declaration that these self-evident truths are a sham – the “Froth of July.”  

Where, then, I asked, do our rights come from? 

[We would return to that question a few weeks later when we discuss the Lockean Dilemma. Since Jefferson wrote the declaration, some might prefer to refer to it as the Jeffersonian Dilemma; but Locke is the antecedent, and Jefferson poses so many possible dilemmas and contradictions as to require clarification as to which one.]

The exact origin of phrase “we hold these truths to be self evident. . .” is in some doubt.  Some argue that the words came directly from John Locke – although acknowledging that his original words were “life, health, liberty, or possessions." Others argue that the words came to Jefferson through his neighbor Philip Mazzei.  Historian Garry Wills in INVENTING AMERICA: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence goes to great lengths to argue that there was little  thought of John Locke in Jefferson’s mind.  I’m not convinced, for one cannot easily deny the foundation of the American democracy was set squarely on the writings of John Locke (especially his Two Treatises on Government, 1869, and his Letter Concerning Toleration.) 

Because these words – drafted by Jefferson -- were written in the Declaration of Independence and not in the U. S. Constitution, their meaning has bounced around like a philosophical pinball.  Cynthia Dunbar, Professor of Law at Liberty University argues for the legal practice of “incorporation by reference.” “When you have in one legal document reference to another, it pulls them together, so that they can’t be viewed as separate and distinct.  So you cannot read the Constitution distinct from the Declaration.”  The jury is hung on that question, although on a few occasions, but only a few, the U.S. Courts have interpreted what “pursuit of happiness” means (in one case, the right to marry was judged to be a right according to the Declaration of Independence and its declaration of the right to pursue happiness.

The idea of equality – though not fully bloomed – was a radical and dangerous (literally “revolutionary”) concept when John Locke wrote (at times anonymously) in an age of divine right monarchs and noble classes with their clearly delineated hierarchy.

Jefferson might not have envisioned all that we understand it to mean today, and what Jefferson wrote may be subject to deconstruction in our postmodern age, but we are reminded every January of the import of those “words” when we hear them read in recordings of Martin Luther King’s speech.