What did the Founders mean when they wrote "the pursuit of happiness"? What can their intent tell us about improving American well-being today?
Lorenzo Shakespeare, a 2025 Wheatley Scholar, joined Nathan Leonhardt from Brigham Young University and Daniel Frost from Public Square Magazine to explore the Founder's definition of happiness in a new Deseret News op-ed. Though modern Americans often interpret the phrase to mean the ability to pursue pleasure, or to "feel good", the Founders understood the term to mean "the quest for being good".
"This is an important point often overlooked in modern culture," Shakespeare and his co-authors write. "Throughout history, thinkers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Averroes, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and many others agree that happiness cannot exist apart from virtue."
Why is virtue— or "excellence of character"— so critical to happiness? "Virtues help us actualize our highest potential," they explain. This is especially noticeable in community settings. "Virtues stabilize trust, repair ruptures and build the kind of shared moral foundation that allows communities to become safer, stronger and more united." As important as virtue is to both personal and social flourishing, it's not something that can be caught in a classroom. "Virtue is more likely to be learned by inspiring and modeling," the authors say, noting that "religion is another source for virtue development."