The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised , by Richard Kraut

Abstract

It is hard not to like a book that so outrageously and skilfully defies expectations. Richard Kraut is among the leading authorities on Aristotle’s ethics, and his recent volume, What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (Kraut (2007)) gave us one of the best contemporary articulations of the Aristotelian approach to well-being. The title of this one, The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised, suggests a mere refinement of this approach. Well, it does say ‘revised’. But then, historians have taken such disparate views of Aristotle’s ethics that just about any contemporary theory might fairly be deemed a revision of Aristotle’s account. At the very least, the bits about women and slaves call for some departures from the original. But there are revisions and there are revisions, and this one is a doozy: herein lies an extended defence of ‘experientialism’—roughly, the view that well-being consists wholly, or almost wholly, in experiences. Not Benthamite hedonism, to be sure—crucially, Kraut maintains that pleasure is just one among many kinds of intrinsically beneficial experience, and not the most important of them. Nonetheless, Kraut’s view bears more than a passing resemblance to Mill’s qualitative hedonism, and it is noteworthy that over a quarter of the book is given to an extended rebuttal of objections rooted in Nozick’s experience machine case, a standard worry for hedonistic theories. Aristotelian readers will not, I suspect, be universally pleased. Yet this book makes a remarkably strong case that Aristotle’s view can indeed be developed in an experientialist direction. More importantly, it is a major contribution to the contemporary debate about well-being, mounting the most compelling defence yet of an experiential approach to well-being.