In declaring their independence from Great Britain, Americans famously asserted their unalienable rights. Much less conspicuously, but no less tellingly, they listed 10 moral responsibilities consonant with those rights.
In announcing their political separation, they begin by acknowledging a duty to observe “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” by stating the causes for their decision. 1). “Decent” means fitting, appropriate; the opinions of mankind are fittingly respected because human beings possess the capacity for sociality, for understanding one another, for giving reasons for their conduct. Any important public action entails the responsibility to explain oneself, to justify that action before the bar of reasoning men and women.
To justify oneself, in turn, requires Americans to state their standard of justice. That standard is unalienable natural rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 2). Justice numbers among the four cardinal classical virtues, defined and elaborated by Plato, Cicero, and other philosophers well known to the Declaration’s signers. Just conduct consists of actions defending natural rights in a civil society; to assert those rights, to separate oneself from those who would violate them, logically entails respecting those rights in all other persons, inasmuch as “all men are created equal,” all equally entitled to enjoy their natural rights undisturbed by tyrants.
Governments that secure such rights are established by the consent of the governed. This means that consent cannot mean mere assent or willingness. It can only mean reasoned assent. 3). Reasoned assent to natural right implies a modest degree of another classical virtue, wisdom. In this case, it is what Aristotle calls “theoretical” wisdom, understanding general or abstract principles. Americans recognize their duty to understand what human nature is—not only the nature of Americans, or the English, or the French, but of human beings as such.
4). Aristotle identifies a second kind of wisdom: practical or prudential wisdom, the ability to figure out commonsense ways to secure the rights of human nature established in theory. “Prudence,” the Declaration states, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” Long-established governments have lasted a long time for some good reasons; they have stood the test of experience, of practice. Much of the Declaration of Independence is given over to showing why the causes for which the signers owe mankind an enumeration are not light and transient. They are profound and long-lasting, and to fail to foresee their likely results would be to fail to exercise the virtue of prudence.
5). Closely related to prudence is a third classical virtue, moderation. Like all of mankind, Americans have exhibited patience in enduring “sufferable” evils as subjects of the British empire. Only “a long train of abuses” revealing an intention by the regime of that empire to “reduce them under an absolute Despotism” gives them not only the right but also the duty to “throw off” that regime and concomitantly to frame a new order that will secure their natural rights. Both prudence and moderation justify a right to revolution and, simultaneously, the duty to found a regime that will work better in practice.
6). The fourth classical virtue is courage. Without it, wisdom, justice, and moderation by themselves will leave you high and dry. As a baseball manager once said of a rival, “Nice guys finish last.” Accordingly, Americans announce their intention to defend their rights with “manly firmness.” It should be noted that manliness in their minds had no “gender.” Abigail Adams was no less “manly” in her firmness than her husband, John. He knew that and said it. Looking back on the American Revolution, he wrote that those were times that tried women’s souls as well as those of men, and that American women had exhibited no less courage than their husbands and sons. Several decades later, gallant Tocqueville went so far as to say that America owed much of its success in self-government to “the superiority of her women” to those seen in European ballrooms and salons, where the sterner virtues had gone out of fashion.
7). The signers also held up the virtue of civility against barbarism, by which they didn’t mean primitiveness. They meant Machiavellianism, the intention to rule by force and fraud or, in their own words, cruelty and perfidy. By this standard, the English monarch’s policies regarding the American colonists were barbaric, however “civilized” his pomp and circumstance may have made him seem. Aristotle understands human nature to be not only rational but also political or civil. By “political,” he means the capacity to rule and be ruled in turn, as good husbands and wives do in a justly ordered household, and as citizens do among themselves. Political or civil rule contrasts with parental rule—rule over children for “their own good.” The civic equivalent of this would be a kingship, one-man or one-woman rule for the good of the subjects, often described as the “children” of the monarch. Political or civil rule also contrasts with the rule of masters over slaves, which is established, Aristotle observes, for the good of the master, not the slave. The virtue of civility treats naturally equal human beings as equal citizens in a regime designed to give every citizen representation in government—government by consent. Civility animates the regime of republicanism, which will replace British tyranny.
While petitioning the monarch in humble terms, they also appeal to the “magnanimity” of their “British brethren,” the people of Great Britain. 9). Magnanimity—literally, greatness of soul—crowns and epitomizes the classical virtues. Aristotle describes the magnanimous man as one whose soul is big enough to endure the rigors of political life without resentment, without the petty retaliation exercised by men of micropsychia, smallness of soul. The Americans understand that their action will take the British people by surprise. Britain’s mighty empire, a source of understandable national pride, will be diminished. Having given up on showing humility before the king—humility isn’t groveling—Americans ask from his people nothing less than greatness of soul. They can demand no less from themselves, as well, and accordingly hold the British people “enemies in War” but “in Peace friends.” They see that a war of independence will provoke angry passions in their own hearts against that people, even as they now feel such passions against King George and the British parliament. They vow to greet former battlefield enemies with magnanimity, once peace has been restored.
It has never been the case that Biblical humility and classical magnanimity comport easily with one another. The signers of the Declaration of Independence pair them. They can do so because they understand humility as a virtue attendant to due deference—in civil society, to a monarch insofar as he adheres to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God; in civil society and in nature, to God and His laws, to be obeyed by peoples and monarchs, commoners and aristocrats alike.
10). Finally, to one another the Americans pledge “our sacred Honor.” If Americans owe a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, they owe honor to one another, particularly loyalty in a great and good shared action, the establishment of just self-government in their country. They will not betray one another. They will respect the opinions of others, but in this task each will deserve the good opinion of his countrymen.
In all this, Washington became a living embodiment of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, their foremost practitioner, and the example for Americans of the virtues Americans esteemed. Throughout the soul-trials of revolutionary regime change and peaceful regime-building, Washington and his fellow Americans never considered these virtues uniquely American, but rather as the shared patrimony of all human beings, under the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.
