Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen

Watch the 1-hour lecture by author and Harvard Professor Danielle Allen, recorded at the Library of Congress on November 21, 2019

Partial transcript:

At 31:50:

>> Colleen Shogan: So, we talked a little bit about self-evident.  Let's talk about the phrase all men.  And you have a particular interpretation of who that includes.  So, can you talk a little bit about that, and you use the Declaration to answer that question.
>> Danielle Allen: Sure.  So, it's really important to recognize how the language worked at the time, and also to acknowledge that language works differently now for us.  So, the word men here was an example of the general universal usage of men to capture human beings.  And we know that Jefferson used the work this way because later in his draft he does the same thing.  So, in the same passage I mentioned, about the condemnation of the slave trade, he condemns slave markets where men, and he writes it in all caps are bought and sold.  And we know that in slave markets, women and children were also bought and sold.  There's no sense in which that use of the word man, was supposed to mean only males.  And it's exactly the same here, that the word is being used to capture all human beings.  That said, it doesn't excuse or do away with the fact that they also chose to organize the powers of government through a patriarchal structure of political organization.  So the principles were ones that they did actually mean with the universal conception of human beings.  But when it came time to talk about how to organize the powers of government, that they were very explicit about restricting to men.  And in the language of John Adams, when Abigail Adams pushed him to say what about the women, where do we fit in all of this?  His answer was that the principles rights of life, liberty, and happiness that's for you too.  That's for everybody.  But in terms of how that gets delivered, that's the job of men and we're not going to give up, in his phrase, our masculine system of government for delivering on those rights.  So that final cause that distinctions between the principles that everything is grounded on and how the powers of government are organized.  That's how they split their thinking, right.  So, they really did actually think the principles captured all human beings.  But then they had patriarchal and race-based conception of how to organize the powers of government.  That's where the problem came in.

At 36:00:

>> Colleen Shogan: We see the second usage of the word equal in this sentence.  In what sense is equal used differently or have a separate meaning than what we say in the first sentence?  
>> Danielle Allen: Great.  No, thank you.  That's a great question.  So, the first sentence, I really pointed out the concept of these spheres of agency that are left untouched by others, free from domination by others.  This passage gets to something different.  It gets to what I like to describe as basic human moral equality.  So, you might think that first concept as being kind of political equality that I was trying to name.  And now, this gets to basic human moral equality.  Where it really focuses on the thing that puts us on an equal footing with each other.  And that is just that kernel of agency I described at the very beginning.  The fact that every human being is trying to make tomorrow better than today, or better than yesterday.  Each of us in our way is pursuing happiness, some improvement in well-being or welfare.  And then, in order to do that, to act on that, we need protections for life and liberty that make it possible for us to act on that kernel of agency that we have.  But the other really important thing in the sentence that gets to this concept of human equality is the notion that human beings make judgments for themselves about their safety and happiness, okay.  And the declaration rests on this really quite stunning idea that for each and every one of us there is no human being, other than ourselves who is better positioned than we are ourselves to make judgments about our future happiness.  Did you follow that?  That was an abstract formulation.  So, in other words, it's true that none of us are really that good at figuring out our own happiness.  Okay, like we have to admit that.  Like, we're mostly pretty bad at figuring out our own happiness.  But even though we're not that great any of us at figuring out our own happiness, there's not a single human being out there who's better positioned than I am myself to figure that out for myself.  There's no other human being who has access about what I know about my aspirations, about my capacities, about my commitments, and my loves and my passions.  Nobody else has access to all of that.  And as a consequence, no other human being can answer the question of what my path to happiness is. And so there's a sort of staggering recognition of actually weird like isolation of human beings in their responsibility for their own path to happiness.  But in that isolation that we have is also where our individual empowerment and agency reside.  And our equality to one another.  You can't tell me what my path to happiness is because you don't got the goods to know.  All right.  That puts the responsibility on me.  I've got to answer that question myself because I'm the only one who's got the goods to figure that out for myself.  But then once you recognize that about human beings, it's kind of really a deep point, because it really raises the question then about how do we then build collective structures and do political work together once we recognize that.  None of us has actually really got the goods to tell anybody else what to do.