What rights does the Declaration mention?

The Declaration of Independence names life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as among the unalienable rights with which all people are endowed by their Creator, listing them as examples rather than as an exhaustive set. The full sentence in the second paragraph reads that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The phrase is best understood through three layers. The first is Lockean. John Locke had argued in the Second Treatise of Civil Government in 1689 that people in a state of nature possess rights to life, liberty, and property, and that they form government to secure those rights. Thomas Jefferson knew Locke deeply and adopted his framework, but substituted "the pursuit of Happiness" for "property," partly because property was already protected in colonial charters and partly because Jefferson and his contemporaries used "happiness" in the broader classical sense of human flourishing rather than mere pleasure. George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights of June 12, 1776, drafted weeks before the Declaration, lists "the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety" as inherent rights, showing the phrase was already in circulation.

The second layer is the meaning of unalienable. The word means that the rights cannot be transferred or surrendered, even by the person who holds them, and government cannot legitimately take them away. This is why the Declaration treats them as the foundation of legitimacy: governments are instituted among men to secure these rights, and when government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

The third layer is the universalist claim. The phrase "all men are created equal" was radical in 1776 because most of the world lived under monarchy, aristocracy, or feudal hierarchy. Jefferson's draft would have explicitly condemned the Atlantic slave trade had Congress not struck the passage. The contradiction between the universal language and the institution of slavery shaped American politics for the next 89 years until ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, and inspired Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others to invoke the Declaration's words against the country's failures.

Although the Declaration is not law, courts and political leaders treat its principles as the moral foundation of the constitutional order.