The Declaration's assertion that we are all created equal has confounded generations of readers. Given how varying our abilities are, in what way are we all equal? My answer was that we are all equal in sharing a *status* as rights-bearing creatures, a status that requires for its realization that we all have equal access to the tool of government.

Beneath those types of equality lies something even more fundamental, even more profound. Each of us is capable of participating directly in politics because each of us is the best judge of her own happiness.

—Danielle Allen, “Our Declaration”


This is what is so dazzling in the Declaration: its unbounded optimism in the capacity of human beings to see the future in the present well enough—not perfectly, but well enough—to move toward securing happiness

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The colonists did just that. They did the very thing the Declaration says we can do ... Collectively, using politics, they inched their way towards happiness.

They belived this was possible because they belived in human equality. The fundamental feature of human equality in the argument of the Declaration is, we now realize, this: None can judge better than I whether I am happy; each can judge for himself, just as well as I can for myself, whether he is happy. As judges of our own happiness, we are equals.

This gem of an idea is the prize of our quest. Hold fast to it, and one must also immediately grasp the importance of self-knowledge.
One will grasp as immediately the unrelenting work for which each of us, in the face of this equality, must take responsibility—achieving self-understanding is like hard, slow tunneling. Hold fast to the idea that we all judge our own happiness best, and one can calculate the value of conversation; only when others tell us about themselves, and about what they see, have we any chance of setting their happiness and ours in relation to one another. Hold fast to this idea, and one has the root of democracy. Only a political system built out of conversation—where multitudes share what they have come to inderstand with others—has even a scintilla of a chance of making good on the fundamental human truth that none can judge better than I whether I am happy.

The process by which the Declaration came to life—the structure of committees and meetings in every colony and in the Continental Congress, the need for consensus at so many different levels—brought to life these abstract ideas about human potential. They gave living form to the importance of coversation for setting individual and collective happiness in relation to one another.

Think of the institutions of government, then, as the insturment that democratic citizens use to hold the massive shared, even if acromonious, conversation in which we figure out how to relate our prospects for happiness to those of others. To secure our futures we all need an equal opportunity to use the insturment of government. What's more, equal access to that insturment is necessary simply to protect our human equality as judges of our own happiness.

—"our Declaration"