Barrett states that the United States’ legal system assumes that emotions are part of our supposed animal nature and cause us to perform foolish and even violent acts, unless we control them with our rational thought (Barrett, 221). While this analysis of the American legal system seems convincing at the outset, further investigation reveals that the preceding contention is loaded with underlying assumptions. They are the following: firstly, it is assumed that human rationality and animal nature are incompatible, yet that they must nevertheless coexist inside the human mind. It may be further surmised that, due to the domineering quality bestowed upon rationality – as, according to the aforementioned contention, it has the ability to control other less refined, barbaric thoughts – rationality and animalistic conceptions have an apparent inequitable influence over one’s action. Secondly, the words ‘foolish’ and ‘violent’ presuppose negative emotion including but not limited to anger, frustration, shame and regret. The implication is that actions motivated by our inborn animal nature have the ability to be classified by the basis of their perceptual emotional content. This further suggests that it is possible to evaluate the action of a third-party and objectively categorize it as conforming to one emotional stereotype or another. These aforementioned assumptions are unconvincing. Using the constructivist view of emotion, in conjunction with an examination of the homicide case of Ella Bennett, it will be argued that it is possible for negative emotions, specifically resentment, anger and revenge, to influence and augment rationality.
The constructivist view of emotion describes how the brain uses past experience, organized as concepts – patterns of past experience that are used to perceive and flexibly guide action in new situations – to give sensations meaning (Barrett, 28). When the concepts involved are emotions concepts, the brain constructs instances of emotion. To elucidate, it may be said that an emotion is the brain’s creation of what one’s bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on in the world. Interestingly, because of the varying contextual situations of reality, each of us uses our concepts to understand the world in a way that is useful to us but is not necessarily true in some absolute sense (Barrett, 33). The implication of the preceding idea is that an objective emotional fingerprint is non-existent under the constructivist theory of emotion, meaning that one instance of a particular emotion may not appear like another instance of that ‘same’ emotion, nor will it be caused via the same biological pathway. Moreover, because emotions are made by the brain, as opposed to being triggered, emotions and cognition are indistinct (Barrett, 34). This assertion will be particularly relevant when analyzing the emotional, motivational force behind Ella Bennett’s slaughter.
The case of Ella Bennett details how Ella, aged four at the time of her death, was brutally murdered by her brother, Paris Bennett, who was aged thirteen at the time he committed the crime. While his mother was away at work, Bennett choked and beat his little sister to death; he then proceeded to stab her seventeen times. After the homicide, he called the police on himself, initially telling authorities that he had committed the slaying out of fright after having been petrified by a hallucination in which Ella appeared as a demonic figure. He later retracted this statement, admitting that the murder was premeditated: “by [killing my sister] I knew that I could hurt my mother in the worst possible way, because I had always known, as a child, that the most devastating thing to my mother would be the loss of one of her children, and I found a way to take away both her children in one fell swoop” (Pengelly, 2019). He added that, “for many years, there was just this hot, flaming ball of wrath in the pit of my stomach, and it was directed at my mother… I chose to do my crime, and I take full responsibility for [it]” (ibid).
The preceding case is attractive for the furtherance of this project, as it obvious that Paris Bennett’s motivations for murder were almost entirely driven by negative emotional attitudes, yet in the moments leading up to the homicide and in those that followed, Bennett acted with a great deal of intelligence, methodology and intentionality. Bennett himself has stated that, “I wouldn’t say that there was a predisposition to what happened. I am not insane, and I don’t suffer from any mental illness” (ibid). In fact, according to his IQ score of one-hundred and forty-one, he is a genius; there clearly is no dispute over the immense intelligence he possesses. Bennett’s advanced cognitive abilities, when examined in conjunction with his testimony, expose an obvious tension between the ideology of the legal system, in which emotion and reason are said to be distinct entities, and the reality of constructed emotion, which states that emotions are not distinct from cognitions and perceptions.
Barrett states that laws in the United States have been shaped by the classical view of emotion, whereby it is assumed that anger, among other unfavorable emotions, is one unitary cauldron, that when unconstrained by clear thought, bubbles over to unleash a torrent of aggression… making people unable to conform their actions to the law (Barrett, 221). It must be granted that, when dissected, the preceding statement seamlessly explains the Bennett case: Paris Bennett was inspired and motivated by his anger to commit a heinous, illegal act of injustice, and that, had this deep resentment for his mother been absent, Ella Bennett would most likely be alive today. However, it is important to note that Bennett allowed his emotion to fuel his rationality without sacrificing control of his actions: he used his concept of resentment to conceive, plot and ultimately execute the premeditated murder of his sister. Bennett’s ultimate goal was to inflict the maximum amount of pain and misery on his mother, and through careful consideration of the emotional and legal repercussions of his actions, Bennett devised what is arguably the most infallible way of guaranteeing his mother’s emotional trauma: the slaughtering of his younger sister. In doing so, Bennett can be said to have acted in anger with intent, methodically plotting the demise of his mother (Barrett, 223). He used his concept of anger to guide a calculated, malicious murder; this notion is consistent with the constructivist view of emotion.
The actions of Paris Bennett are a paradigmatic example of how there cannot exist an emotional fingerprint for anger: according to Barrett’s interpretation, the United States legal system classifies anger, and all emotions, as automatically triggered reactions spewing from one’s inner beast (Barrett, 222). To elucidate, the classical view of emotion states that emotions arise when specific neurological pathways in the brain become stimulated. These neurological pathways correspond to an emotion center in the brain, and when triggered, produce the same physiological response in every human, regardless of context. This physiological response is then recognized as the display of particular emotion. The typical physiological response for anger supposedly includes a flushed face, clenched jaw, flared nostrils, increased heart rate, blood pressure and perspiration; rarely do most instances of anger result in murder, as the idea of anger as a trigger for uncontrolled murder is at best questionable (Barrett, 222), but in accordance with Bennett’s testimony, his primary motive was a deeply-rooted, long-term anger towards his mother.
Furthermore, it is important to note that the classical view of emotion presupposes an immediacy to emotional response. In the case of Paris Bennett, there was no immediacy, nor was there a barbaric inner beast assuming control of Bennett’s rationality. Paris Bennett’s anger developed over the course of many years, eventually culminating in manslaughter. He used his past experience and feeling of prolonged negative sentiment, in conjunction with his present perceptive evaluation of his situation and his foresight, to construct a rational course of action given his present context and his evaluation thereof. Bennett was not… at the mercy of his environment, triggered by anger to pursue an inevitable, aggressive act, as the classical view of emotion might assume. Instead, Bennett’s anger unfolded very deliberately over a long time, suggesting that there was nothing inherently automatic about it (Barrett, 245). The implication of the preceding phrase is that Bennett had cognitive control over his emotion, perhaps in the form of a controlled suppression. In this sense, he was able to use his rationality to reign in the negative emotions he felt when their expression was inappropriate. Contrarily, Bennett was additionally able to use his higher-order cognitive abilities to amplify and guide the exhibition of his emotion to further achieve the destruction he designed and desired.
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