Rethinking time, ethics and justice : a jurisprudential perspective

Abstract

This study contends that time, narrative and justice cannot be separated from one another. One always demands that the other two also be considered. If we accept that law should be held accountable to a higher ethical standard, then law’s relationship with time and narrative is also important. Good law can only exist through a responsible and active engagement with this challenge. Unfortunately it is not in law’s interest to honour its responsibility, and the legal system as described by Niklas Luhmann is not interested in justice. Law’s only aims are to be legitimate and to ensure its own continued perpetuation. These aims are in threatened when law is required to appeal to norms outside of itself. Thus law has developed certain mechanisms in order to shirk this responsibility: It draws boundaries between itself and its environment; it removes its operations from human reality; it undermines human identity and agency (intention and causality) by reducing it in complexity and meaning; and finally it protects itself through building up its own unreal and false complexity. Law is able to do this by turning its back on its relationship with time (and by extension, narrative). Time is stripped of duration and reduced to a succession of presents. This has two effects: firstly human identity and agency becomes meaningless and secondly, moral or ethical judgment becomes impossible. By cutting the knot instead of trying to unravel it, law avoids its responsibility to be moral. One way of stepping up to the challenge of justice, time and law is through Ricoeur’s narrative time. Human beings and larger social entities all have narrative and temporal duration and location. It recognises that humans have an identity that can not be divorced from time and narrative. This structure also gives necessary context and meaning to actions, and allows us to make moral judgments.