Declaration of Independence, July 1776 (I.1.5)

It is self-evident that all men are created equal and have rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This idea is momentous. The rest of the text is a familiar list of complaints about the tyrannical interference by the English government, and a formal breaking of the bond with England. We will take a look only at the famous line.

The term "self-evident" refers to the property a truth has of being obviously true to anyone who understands it. For instance, it is self-evident that orange is more like red than it is like blue, and that scotch whiskey is not the best bowling ball in the world (because it is not a bowling ball.) No proof need be given for these things, in order for their truth to be grasped just by understanding them.

Similarly, to one who understands morality and human beings, the equality of human beings and their basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are obvious. As for equality, the Founders did discuss the rough equality in strength and wits of human beings, which would prevent any one of them from subjecting all the others. But the equality of the Declaration is that of moral desert, a wholly different concept. This is not the equal desert of material goods, which we find in leftist dogma. It can only be the equality of consideration in moral deliberation. That is, in making moral judgments of a man, all irrelevant particularities about his identity are to be ignored: his hair color, the rank of his father, his location in a colony, rather than in England, etc. The morally relevant features of his person are those he can share with anyone else. Equality here is equality before the moral law. That moral deliberation requires taking its objects to be equal before the moral law is a self-evident truth. If you understand it, you see that it is true. Equality before the moral law is the basis for equality before political law.

The three rights enumerated are similarly obvious to anyone who understands morality. Morality certainly has to do with taking into consideration the interests of all people in its scope. It has to do with judging whether these interests ought to be protected, ignored or violated. Morality has to do with more than that, but apart from that we cannot conceive of morality but only of various cults and fetishes which have only the fact of their supposed normativity in common with morality. Now, the most fundamental interests of people are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious to anyone who understands what morality is and what these claims to rights are that these claims are valid and the rights real.

It perhaps cannot be overemphasized that there is no trace here of the economic egalitarianism of leftist dogma mentioned above. Only the right to the pursuit of happiness is admitted. There is no right to happiness, let alone a guarantee to such by the state.