Abstract:
The article aims at contrasting the autopoietic understanding of an individual and her or his
actions as described by Niklas Luhmann with Paul Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity,
focusing on people as legal subjects. The article assumes that when legal subjects necessitate
ethical engagement and evaluation, the law could cease to deal with problems in a mere
legalistic fashion but is allowed the freedom to appeal to norms of justice external to itself as
in other natural law theories. Through narrative identity the deeds of role players are to be
understood in greater complexity than what a self-referential legal system is comfortable in
dealing with.
Description:
This article represents a
reworked version of aspects
of the LLM dissertation
(University of Pretoria),
entitled ‘Rethinking time,
ethics and justice: A
jurisprudential perspective’
with Prof. Karin van Marle
as supervisor. Advocate
Nico Buitendag is a student
at Leiden University, in the
Netherlands.
