Liberal states rationalize torture by calibrating pain to legal necessity thresholds.

Evidence

But the remarkable feature of the Israeli case is the scrupulous concern of a liberal-democratic state with calibrating the amount of pain that is legally allowable. There is evidently a concern that too much pain should not be applied. (The thought “too much” relates here not to subjective experience, the unbearability of pain, but to objective means—to what is strictly necessary to secure the desired ends.) It is assumed that “moderate physical and psychological pressure” is at once necessary and sufficient to secure confession. Beyond that quantity, pressure is held to be excessive (gratuitous), and therefore presumably becomes “torture.” Other states in the Middle East are rarely so punctilious. Or so modern in their reasoning. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 557

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my reading on the modern administrative state’s rationalization and legal line-drawing on violence, and to Foucault’s normalization of disciplinary power.
• SEED: Article angle: how liberal democracies preserve moral identity while torturing, by converting pain into a legally quantified resource subject to calibration rather than moral prohibition.