Paradigm Change, Law, and Persons: Producing Legal Responsibility for Pain

Abstract

Drawing on the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, this chapter demonstrates how science and law are coproduced through the operation of different “paradigms” of pain. Following Ricoeur, a paradigm is here understood as a general framework from which emerge emplotments of individual narratives, in this case as they explain particular instances of pain. For Ricoeur, moral responsibility is enjoined to causality in narrative. In considering how legal responsibility for pain is produced, this chapter looks to the way that nonhuman actants—such as an “injury”—are bound up in the same causal-moral economy as human characters. Emplotments of selected legal narratives—taking the form of judgments in case law relating to workers’ compensation disputes in the Australian State of Victoria—will be related to the paradigm from which they emerge, which is partially constituted by Victoria’s Workplace Injury Rehabilitation Compensation Act 2013. In considering the moral dimension of narrative, this chapter will consider whether a paradigm—existing as potential, rather than realized, emplotment—has a “crypto normative” function, or hidden moral structure, that serves as a powerful moment in the coproduction of science and law, and helps explain the pertinacity of body–mind dualism, despite its obsolescence in science.