Emotions are treated as external forces that diminish legal culpability

Evidence

Even when it refers to leaving undone what ought to have been done, the responsibility of individuals refers to an action in opposition to a passion. That is the reasoning behind the legal doctrine that “crimes of passion” are less culpable than calculated crimes since in them the agent’s capacity for reason (and therefore, in the Kantian sense, for moral judgment) is diminished by the intrusion of an “external force.” Like the act of an insane person, a crime of passion is not considered to be the consequence of an agent’s own intention. Now that emotions are generally thought of as part of the internal economy of the self, the notion is reinforced that agency means the self-ownership of the individual to whom external power always signifies a potential threat. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 363

Categorization

• FICTION: A legal world where passion literally displaces the self’s ownership of its own acts is rich character territory.
• XREF: Shades of the ‘affect vs. reason’ split in Enlightenment-era law and philosophy.