In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari asks what the American Declaration of Independence would say if its claims were expressed in biological terms. He offers the following reformulation:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.”¹

The substitutions serve his broader argument that equality and rights belong to an “imagined order”: principles sustained by shared human belief rather than features of biology. He accepts their value for cooperation but denies that principles of justice possess objective validity.

Harari’s reformulation raises a legitimate question about the Declaration’s foundations. An appeal to a Creator and an assertion of self-evidence do not remove the need to justify its principles. His biological substitutions, however, do not establish that those principles are mistaken. They change the questions under examination.

The equality asserted in the Declaration concerns the standing of human beings in relation to political authority. The document proceeds directly from its statement of rights to the proposition that governments exist to secure those rights and derive their legitimate powers from the consent of the governed. This is an argument about the justification of government. It requires no assumption that people possess identical bodies, abilities, or temperaments.² Biological differences do not, by themselves, establish anyone’s entitlement to rule another person.

The substitution of “mutable characteristics” for “unalienable rights” introduces a similar confusion. A characteristic describes a person’s condition or capacities. A right establishes a claim concerning how that person may be treated. The fact that strength, memory, or mobility can diminish tells us nothing, by itself, about whether the person may legitimately be enslaved. Harari’s substitution removes the moral question instead of answering it.

The appeal to a Creator can certainly be disputed. But the rejection of that theological premise leaves the justification of equality open to further argument. It does not demonstrate that no justification is possible. Nor does an account of the historical origins of a conviction settle whether there are sufficient reasons to uphold it.

Liberty and happiness also resist the proposed substitutions. The distinction between voluntary action and enforced captivity concerns observable conditions of human life, even though their moral significance requires further reasoning. And even if pleasure were easier to measure than happiness, ease of measurement would not establish that the two are equivalent. That reduction requires an argument of its own.

Harari acknowledges that shared belief in equality can support cooperation and a better society. His position is therefore more substantial than a simple dismissal of rights as useless inventions. Yet his further assertion that principles of justice lack objective validity remains a philosophical claim; their absence from a biological description does not establish it.¹

The Declaration must answer for the principles it asserts. Harari must likewise answer for the standard by which he dismisses their objective validity. To show that rights are not biological characteristics is insufficient to show that rights lack rational justification. His reformulation makes the Declaration’s language unfamiliar, but the argument about what human beings owe one another remains unresolved.

Sources

1. Yuval Noah Harari. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. English edition, 2014. Chapter 6, “Building Pyramids.”
2. National Archives. Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.